


Fading Skies

by Diamond_Raven



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Disability, Disabled Character, Established Relationship, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Original Character(s), Paraplegia, Permanent Injury, Physical Disability, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Wheelchair Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-20
Updated: 2009-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-05 23:24:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 62,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5394086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diamond_Raven/pseuds/Diamond_Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After John is badly wounded while serving in Somalia, he and Rodney have to learn how to make a serious physical disability a part of their lives.</p><p>(this fic takes place in the 1990s, during which time DADT was US military policy)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Waiting

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place in an alternate universe with no mention of the Stargate program.
> 
> For plot purposes, Rodney has to be able to make multiple medical decisions on John’s behalf. I do include having Rodney become John’s health care proxy in the story, but I realize that in the 1990s in some hospitals, Rodney might have encountered pushback from the medical staff regarding his ability to make decisions on John’s behalf once staff realize that they are not relatives. For this story, please assume that Rodney has the correct paperwork in place and that paperwork is respected by all medical personnel involved.

Grumbling under his breath, Rodney searched through his pockets, trying to locate his ring of keys without dropping one of the four grocery bags he had in his arms.

Finally finding them, he fished them out and opened the small apartment door and shuffled inside, barely making it to the kitchen before he dropped the bags on the counter. He tossed the keys on the counter as well and then took a moment to stare around the silent apartment.

“He’s almost home,” Rodney told the unmoving furniture. With those words, that usual thrill of excitement ran down his back, squeezing his insides in such a way that made him want to run up and down the hallways, screaming that it was nearly time for John to come home. Going over to the calendar on the fridge, he grabbed the pen tied on it and crossed off another day. He didn’t need to count how many more empty squares there were until he would reach the one that said ‘COMING HOME DAY’. 13 days. Thirteen days, eight hours and twenty two minutes, but who was counting?

Going back to the counter, he rummaged through the grocery bags and took out the new toothpaste, soap and toothbrush that he’d bought. Carrying the items into the bathroom, he tossed the soap and the toothpaste into a drawer and carefully opened the toothbrush package and stuck it into the small holder. Taking the older toothbrush, he tossed it into the garbage. Four months was a long time to sit in a holder without being used. Rodney wouldn’t want that thing near his mouth, and he sure didn’t want it near John’s mouth. Besides, who knew what other unsanitary things John had had to put into his mouth in the past four months? John swore the MREs were the same in Somalia as they had been in Kuwait and every base he had been on, but Rodney always had his doubts.

Glancing around the apartment one more time, he made a mental note to come back and stock up the fridge the day before John came home. Then he grabbed his other grocery bags and shuffled back out the door. Locking it behind him, he walked three doors down the hall and then fiddled with his key ring again, marveling over the fact that over the space of five meters, he had managed to nearly lose them again.

A woman appeared from a few doors down and smirked at him.

“Having problems, McKay?”

He glared. “None as severe as you, thank you. Now go away.”

She smirked, not cowed by his attitude.

Rodney cursed the fact that first off, she was a biology student and secondly, she had been living in the campus apartment complex nearly as long as he had and was used to him. Thirdly, she was doing her PhD just like he was and had been accepted to do her doctorate at the university the same year as Rodney had. The only leverage he had over her was the fact that, hello, biology wasn’t really a science.

“So, watering your friend’s plants again?” From her smirk, Rodney could tell she knew exactly what he had been doing in there.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes.”

“Mm hmm,” she gave him a knowing smile with a raised eyebrow and began sauntered down the hallway. “What do they say, McKay?” she raised an eyebrow and pretended to look confused. “Don’t know, don’t see? Or is it ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’? Look it up for me, would you?”

With a parting smirk, she walked to the end of the hallway and started off down the stairs.

Rodney ignored the parting words and opened his own door. Slamming it behind him, he put his bags on the counter. First he took out all the food and stuffed it into his fridge. Then he took out a box of Lucky Charms and a jar of peanut butter and suppressed a shudder as he put them into his cupboards. That was always a sure sign that John was about to come home. Peanut butter and Lucky Charms appearing in the cupboards again.

Then he took out a new toothbrush from the last bag and walked into the bathroom.

Tossing the old blue toothbrush that sat beside his into the garbage, he unwrapped the new one and put it in the holder.

“You’re going to have to wait a few more days until you’re used,” he murmured.

Going back into the kitchen, he tossed out the empty bags and then threw himself on the couch.

Immediately, something furry wound itself around his ankles and he snapped his fingers lightly and Cat jumped on Rodney’s lap. Rodney smiled at the small tabby and gently scratched her behind the ears.

“Hey, you. Guess what? Thirteen more days. That’s right. Thirteen more days and John comes home.”

She started to purr as she moved her head around, directing Rodney’s fingers.

Nobody ever believed Rodney when he said his cat’s name was Cat, but Rodney didn’t care. It wasn’t like he had intended on naming his cat Cat.

John had brought Cat home the day before he had shipped out to Somalia, knowing how lonely Rodney had gotten while he had been in the Gulf. The day had been the same as all other last days had been, full of clenched jaws, held back tears, desperate hugs and unspoken pleas (which Rodney swallowed) and apologies (which Rodney never allowed John to make).

It was only when John was on the plane that Rodney realized John had forgotten to help him name the cat. Knowing she was both of theirs, Rodney didn’t think it was fair to give her a name himself, so he patiently waited for John to bring it up. It was too dangerous for Rodney to send John any letters, so he always relied on John to answer his unasked questions.

The idiot always chattered on and on about the heat, sand and grumpy warlords, but never brought up the cat’s name. So Rodney had called her Cat, and before he knew it, four months had gone by and the cat was already responding to that name and it had stuck. Let John complain about it when he got home, Rodney thought. It was his own fault for forgetting to bring it up anyway.

Letting Cat get comfortable on his chest, Rodney let his eyes wander around their apartment, skimming over all the pictures decorating the bookshelves and the awards pinned up on the walls.

He sighed quietly. “It’s almost time for them to come down again, isn’t it?”

Although copies of John’s bachelor diplomas—one for math and the other for English—and his masters—for math—hung in his own apartment, the real copies were framed and on their wall here. Pictures of him and John together at various places stood all over the bookshelves, window sills and on the television. Rodney could hardly bear the thought of taking them down and hiding them in the compartment beneath his bed, but knew he should be used to it by now.

*          *          *

It was actually Rodney who had always been the more cautious out of the two.

Back when they had first met—having had the same lunch break back in their first year and having had to share a table in the overcrowded cafeteria on two occasions—Rodney couldn’t believe that such an incredibly hot, smart guy wanted anything to do with him.

Besides all of Rodney’s social shortcomings—and yes, he wasn’t so dense that he didn’t realize he had some issues in that area—he was also 16, two years younger than the vast majority of other first years, including John.

John was an English major—Rodney still shuddered remembering—but he was also a math major and could work his way through proofs nearly as fast as Rodney. Not only that, but he was a sci-fi nut, was just as sarcastic as him, and best of all, he genuinely liked Rodney. They had started hanging out more and more, going to movies, sitting in on each others classes and studying together.

Rodney knew that John was gay and had finally mustered up the nerve to ask him on a real date one random Saturday. John had grinned apologetically and said that he couldn’t since he had training that weekend, like most weekends. It was then that Rodney found out that his super smart and super hot best friend was in the AFROTC, training to be a combat pilot. Their reactions had been so predictable.

Rodney had freaked out, John had frowned in polite confusion, and then Rodney had freaked out even more and John had looked even more confused. It wasn’t that John didn’t know about the military’s policies against officers being openly gay or involved in homosexual situations, it was just that he didn’t care.

Rodney did.

At first, he had tried getting John out of the program, but John wouldn’t hear of it. He needed the money the AFROTC paid for his tuition and living expenses, and besides, he really genuinely wanted to be a soldier. He was also a wing nut, but that was beside the point, since he could fly without being in the military. Rodney had bitched, complained and pleaded, but John had been firm. Not just about him being in the military, but about him and Rodney being together. It turned out that John wanted something to happen between them just as much as Rodney did and in John’s world, he didn’t see why he had to sacrifice either of the two things he was crazy about. If they were in another country, he could have easily had both, but because they were in America, at an American university, he couldn’t.

Rodney would never understand it, but he would be damned if something happened to John because of them. He knew that John loved the military as much as he loved Rodney and Rodney thought of it as his personal responsibility to keep John from having to give up either.

So he was careful.

While they had been undergrads, they had lived in two different residences and the lack of privacy in either space kept them from spending too much time in either place. Rodney had quickly identified all the current ROTC cadets on campus and got used to keeping an eye out for any. He didn’t let John hug him in public or hold his hand and tried to limit touching him in any way until they were alone together. John hated it, Rodney hated it, but that was the way things had to be. Their summers were the only times when they could really go away and be themselves in public. John had boot camp for about four weeks every summer, but aside from that, they could pack up, rent a car and disappear anywhere they wanted where nobody knew that one of them was military.

*          *          *

They both got into grad school, John wanting to get his masters in math and Rodney in both math and astrophysics—and no matter how many times John gave him that incredulous look, Rodney swore it was possible. They both found spaces in an apartment complex on campus which was shared by profs and grad students—and were just mildly amused by the fact that they had managed to be three doors down from each other and on the same floor.

They did what they had always done; spending time outside the apartment—with cautious eyes out for any ultra conservative, narrow minded cadet—and figuring out creative ways to be alone together without being caught.

They were experts at knowing which lab was empty at what time, which bathrooms had the least traffic and even which corners of the library never had any visitors (ironically, the section housing the cookbooks was amongst those). They studied together, went to classes together, helped each other plan tutorials and labs for the classes they were TAs for, and went out to movies and football games (to accommodate John) and symphonies (to accommodate Rodney).

*          *          *

While they were starting their graduate classes in 1990, half way around the world, Iraq invaded Kuwait after suspicions of Kuwait illegally slant-drilling petroleum across Iraq’s borders.

Rodney never cared about world politics or what wars were happening where. He didn’t understand why John was suddenly watching CNN more than before and why he got more pale as time went on. First term came and went with Rodney always yawning and turning a deaf ear whenever the conversation amongst people around him started including the words mideast, UN sanctions, unprovoked attack and US involvement.

It wasn’t until John came into his room one night in January 1991, holding a letter with an Air Force insignia on it that Rodney realized his life was about to drastically change.

He stood there for a good five minutes, staring at the letter and John’s pale face, not really understanding. Sure, he knew John was in the ROTC, he knew John was military, but somehow the fact that John would have to go into combat zones never entered his mind. Boot camp was just something that took up valuable alone-time in the summer and was a source for endless jokes at John’s expense, not something to actually prepare John for battle.

Rodney’s first words were: “This is a joke, right?”

John had stared at him and sighed softly. “You know it isn’t, Rodney.”

“Don’t tell me those are your marching orders.”

“Rodney—”

“No.”

“Rodney—”

“I said, don’t tell me. Tear it up and forget about it. Throw it in the garbage and we’ll rewind this conversation and pretend it never happened.”

John briefly closed his eyes and his fist tightened around the letter. “It doesn’t work like that, Rodney.”

“Then quit. Go see General Renton right now, hand in your tags and tell him you quit.”

John stared at Rodney with such pain in his eyes that Rodney nearly had to look away.

“Rodney, don’t do this to yourself.”

“Do what? I’m giving you the solution to a problem.”

“Please don’t—”

“Why are we still talking about this? Go see Renton and I’ll pop in a video in the mean time and grab popcorn. Classes start tomorrow and I have every intention of milking every last drop of freedom out of winter break while we can. Do you want extra butter or not?” He had already turned to go to his small cupboard when John swore loudly, ran a hand through his hair and lost his composure.

“You know it doesn’t work like that! They paid for my tuition and my living expenses for four years, and now I have to go pay them back. Not with money, but by fighting for them. That’s the deal I made with them. That’s what I agreed to when I signed up. Jesus, Rodney, you knew that! You _knew_ that. You knew this could happen.”

Rodney blinked, feeling like the world had suddenly decided to invert itself. He realized he was starting to shake slightly. His body was starting to accept things faster than his mind. He numbly stared at the letter in John’s hand. He remembered grainy images on CNN of buildings crumbling, fires burning, people screaming and running down dust covered, broken streets. Suddenly it wasn’t just something happening somewhere else that didn’t effect him. John would have to go there. John would have to go there and try to survive in that hell for six months.

“No,” Rodney said. He meant for it to come out strong and loud, a declaration against the military, but instead, it came out as a pleading whisper.

His body had continued reacting without him realizing it and it wasn’t until John stepped up to him, dropping the letter on the floor and taking his face in his hands and using his thumbs to wipe his cheeks that Rodney realized he was crying.

“It’ll be okay. It’s just one tour—”

Rodney tried to laugh but it came out as a sob. “It doesn’t matter if its one hour or a year that you’re there. You could get shot or blown up in the first five minutes of stepping off the plane and you know it.”

John kissed him on the forehead. “Rodney, don’t think like—”

Suddenly angry, Rodney shoved John away from him and glared at him, furiously wiping at his wet face. “How the hell do you want me to think?! You want me to spend the next six months sitting here and pretending you’re in Vegas playing slots? You think I can just ignore where you’re going to be and the fact that you might be hurt or dying somewhere half way around the world and I wouldn’t know about it or be able to help?”

John’s gaze dropped to the floor. “You don’t have to ignore it, Rodney, but you don’t have to worry about it either. You can—”

“I’m sorry, is that statement supposed to make sense? How am I not supposed to worry?”

“You don’t have to wait for me.”

At first Rodney thought John was talking about him waiting for John to finish his sentence before interrupting him and he was about to retort that John had forfeit his right to finish sentences that day, when the real meaning of John’s words hit him like a ton of bricks.

“I don’t—what—did that letter pull all your brain cells out of your ears?”

“Rodney, I’m serious.”

“If you are, then so am I. Because that’s the only way I can think of you saying something idiotic like that.”

“You didn’t sign up for this. I don’t blame you. You deserve someone who you can be with whenever you want. The constant sneaking around and hiding and lying wasn’t fair to you, and asking you to wait for six months and spend those six months worrying isn’t fair either. Let’s just call it a day and move on. We can still be friends.”

Rodney stared at him. “You think I’m going to quit because this relationship is a bit more work than normal ones are?”

“You deserve better.”

“Better? You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me! Yeah, you’re a lot of work, John Sheppard, but you just be glad that you’re worth it. Now, do you want to trade me in for a better model?”

“What?! No!” Rodney slightly mollified by the indignation in John’s voice.

“Good. Then forget we ever had this stupid conversation. It’s over and dealt with. Now, can I please get back to freaking out over something that I really should be freaking out about?”

“You’re sure?”

“About you leaving? Hell no. About this war business being a valuable use of your time? Hell no. About you not being replaceable? Hell yes.”

Something in John’s eyes sparked for a moment, like they always did when Rodney said something that tried to convey how much John meant to him. John took a step forward, grabbed Rodney and pulled him in for a hard kiss. Rodney momentarily fought John off, ran over and locked his tiny bedroom door and pulled down the blinds and then turned around and shoved John on his bed, who laughed quietly and reached up to grab Rodney’s waistband and pull him down on top of him.

*          *          *

By unspoken agreement, they didn’t talk about it for the rest of the week that John had before shipping out. The letter had been thrown into the garbage and the date had been outlined in black with an unhappy face drawn into the square on the calendar on both of their fridges. John had gone to his professors and deregistered from his second semester classes since he would miss all the finals and deadlines anyway and had helped find a replacement TA for the classes he was supposed to be assisting with. They all promised John that when he came back, he should take the summer off to have a break and that they’d start again September but John was adamant about keeping up with his classes and left specific instructions with Rodney about which summer courses he wanted to be registered for if he didn’t make it back before registration time.

They visited a lawyer, at Rodney’s insistence, and drew up documents officially making Rodney John’s health care proxy, allowing him to make medical decisions on John’s behalf, should the worst happen. While at the lawyers, they were careful not to let on that they were anything more than best friends. The fact that John had no living relatives made the process easier.

The night before John was leaving, they lay in Rodney’s bed together—always a safer bet than John’s bed because no military personnel would come to Rodney’s room. Rodney lay with his head on John’s chest, listening to him breathing and staring at the faint glint reflecting off the silver dog tags rimmed with the black rubber silencers lying on his chest. He reached over and traced them with a finger, wanting nothing more than to rip them off and hurl them out the window and forget they ever existed. Pushing himself up, he scooted up John’s body and put his arms on either side of John’s head and stared at him, loving the feeling of John’s body lying beneath his.

John felt the weight of the stare and slowly opened his eyes. “Hey, you,” He whispered, a smile curling his lips.

Rodney didn’t smile back. “Don’t go.”

“Rodney—”

“Please, please, don’t go. Don’t do this to me. Don’t do this to us. You’re leaving your masters and you’re leaving me and neither of us might ever see you again and I don’t think I can handle that. How am I supposed to finish my degrees and be a brilliant scientist if I turn into a mental case? Because that’s what I’ll be. They’ll have to lock me up and I’ll spend days staring at a wall and picking at the stitches in my pants. I won’t hear anybody talking to me and I’ll just always be smiling and saying ‘John’s coming home soon, John’s coming home soon.’ Or worse, I’ll be like one of those pathetic old nutters, sitting on my porch, waiting for you to come home after you went MIA about forty years before. People will feel sorry for me and bring me casseroles and kids will throw eggs and sticks at me.”

“Rodney, don’t be morbid.”

“I’m not being morbid. I’m warning you what’s going to happen to me.”

“I told you, you don’t have to put yourself through that. You don’t have to wait—”

“I thought we agreed never to bring up that idiotic conversation again.”

“Then I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“We can run away. Right now. We can be packed up and ready to go in fifteen minutes. I’ll book a flight while we’re in the cab and we’ll drop your tags in a sewer drain somewhere.”

John sighed and opened his mouth to say something but Rodney was on a role and kept going.

“Lots of others are running, John! Didn’t you notice how Jim Teason and his girlfriend just happened to disappear last week? Besides, Jeannie would take us in. Not only Jeannie but Canada would take us in. I have the citizenship and the government has always been lenient about letting war resistors stay. Nobody would ever find us, John. I swear.”

“Rodney, I wouldn’t be a war resistor, I’d be a deserter. There’s a difference. If I did object to Desert Storm, then I might agree to run, but I’m not just running for the sake of running. I can’t desert, Rodney.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have to go.”

“Screw the military, John! Forget about owing them a few bucks! They exploit kids who don’t have the money for school and don’t have a clue what war is really about.”

John laid a finger on Rodney’s lips, silencing him.

“I didn’t mean my military obligation, Rodney. I meant that I have to go for me.”

“What?”

“I can do some good over there, don’t you see? I have the training to help those people who can’t help themselves. I have to go and use what I’ve learned to protect those people who can’t protect themselves. That’s what being a soldier is about, Rodney. We aren’t just muscle for the sake of being muscle, we are the ones who try to stand between bullies and people who are being bullied and don’t have the resources or the strength to stand up to them.”

“John—”

“If somebody came to you and told you that there was a village somewhere full of people who were dying and that all of their problems would solved if you went there and taught them Newton’s Laws of Motion, would you do it?”

“John, that’s an absolutely ridiculous example—”

“Would you go?”

Rodney scowled. “Of course I would.”

“You see? That’s why I have to go. I wish I could be in two places at once and stay here with you and go at the same time, but I can’t.”

Rodney stared down at him for a long time, finally staring to understand what drove millions of people to chose living in war zones as their careers—whether they were aid workers, medics or soldiers who had to be all three in some cases. What drove nineteen year olds to join up and volunteer for tours in combat zones. Most importantly, he finally understood why John had to leave him.

He reached up and gently traced John’s face, trying to memorize every inch of him. Leaning down, he pressed a soft kiss to his lips and then rested his forehead on John’s.

“I love you, you know that right?”

John nodded, reaching up and wrapping his arms around Rodney’s waist, pulling him as close as he could go.

“I know. And you know I love you and I’m not doing this to hurt you, right?”

“Now I do.”

“Good.”

They spent the rest of the night holding each other, tracing bodies with fingers intent on memorizing every part of them, wiping away tears and not daring to voice any of their fears.

*          *          *

The next morning Rodney went to John’s room and helped him pack up. They both agreed that it was too dangerous for Rodney to write John any letters and that it was John’s sole responsibility to write as much as he could and phone when he could. Rodney asked John for the millionth time whether he had listed Rodney as his emergency contact, John reminded him that he had a class to get to at eleven and they once again launched into an argument over John not wanting Rodney to come to the airport with him. For once it was John who was being cautious, not wanting to lose control of himself and be inappropriate with Rodney in front of hundreds of other soldiers.

Then they sat on the couch and Rodney pulled John’s tags off him and held them in his hand for a long moment.

“It’s your job to protect him from now until he comes back, you hear? I can’t help him over there so it’s your job. Don’t make me regret trusting you.” Then he kissed both of the tags and slipped them back over John’s head. He didn’t see the tears in John’s eyes until he leaned back and then he found himself being grabbed and held so tightly that he couldn’t breathe.

“I’m gonna miss you, McKay,” he whispered into Rodney’s ear.

They stayed like that on the couch until John had to leave. Rodney was determined not to cry or make a fuss since John looked like he was on the verge of breaking down too. Instead, he gave him a tight hug, kissed him, told him he loved him and to be careful, trying to ignore the fact that he was copying every clichéd, cheesy war movie he had ever seen. They didn’t seem so clichéd or cheesy now.

John’s jaw was clenched and he didn’t look like he could handle saying anything so Rodney steered him to the door and pointed out that he had a plane to catch. It wasn’t until he saw John’s taxi pulling away from the curb that Rodney slid down the wall and let himself burst into tears.


	2. The Phone Call

He missed his class at eleven but didn’t really care. He spent two days in bed, watching CNN and being so scared that he made himself throw up four times.

Then he shook himself and thought about how pathetic he looked and how upset John would be if he knew he was acting like this.

So Rodney settled into the routine that all the people staying at home while their loved ones were off at war fell into. Keeping things the same as much as possible, adjusting the things that couldn’t stay the same, and staying as busy as possible.

He gleefully bought himself boxes of ketchup chips and for once could stay clear of the salt and vinegar ones. He got dozens of picture frames and put up pictures of him and John all over his room, knowing that for the next six months, he didn’t have to watch the military personnel on campus like a hawk. He went to all the nearby football games and watched the big ones on TV and made notes of important plays and funny fumbles, knowing John probably wasn’t getting to watch any football right now. He went to classes, started writing his theses and went to John’s room and washed his clothes every few weeks so they wouldn’t get musty.

He still lived his life, but was shocked to discover how lonely he was. He had gotten so used to John being at his side during classes, at the movies and in bed that he found himself talking to him even though he knew he wasn’t there. He’d often be watching something or see somebody do something stupid and he’d turn his head to tell John about it, only to remember that John wasn’t there. So instead, he wrote them all down. It started out with a handful of post-its stuck all over his room but that got unmanageable so he wrote out long lists and kept them in his desk, reviewing them from time to time so he wouldn’t forget why they had been funny by the time John got home.

Whenever the phone rang, his heart would leap into his throat and he’d answer it with trembling hands, sick fear coursing through him, desperately hoping that he wouldn’t hear a stranger on the other end asking him if he was Rodney McKay and whether he was John Sheppard’s emergency contact. Instead, he mostly discovered that it was Jeannie on the other end. Even though she had left university and moved back up to Canada to marry her English major—which always made John grin—Rodney and her still stayed in touch from time to time. Jeannie knew how much Rodney missed John and made sure to call him at least twice a week to listen to him bitch and complain about stupid undergrads and impossible deadlines. She never told him that John had called her before being deployed and asked her to please help keep Rodney sane while he was away.

*          *          *

Occasionally, he’d get a letter or a phone call from John. The letters were always sparse and filled with nonsense about the weather, crappy food and smelly uniforms. Nothing about being scared or missing him or wanting to come home. The phone calls were worse. John always sounded exhausted and homesick and Rodney just never knew what to say to him, but let John chatter on and on about the names he had given various choppers he was flying. Rodney didn’t care that their conversations didn’t have a point, he just wanted to hear John’s voice. They couldn’t openly tell each other they missed each other or loved each other, so they found other ways of doing it. Rodney would talk about how Jeannie missed him and how she loved him and was waiting for him to come back and John would stay quiet for a long time until he’d whisper back that he loved ‘that damn McKay too’ and would do his best to be careful and come home.

Soon the days stretched into weeks, which became months and Rodney watched the days on his calendar being crossed off one by one.

He spent his days keeping busy and not letting himself worry, watch too much CNN or stare at the phone or miss John too much. He spent his nights hugging his pillow, crying and breathing in John’s scent and praying to deities he didn’t believe in to bring him back home.

*          *          *

One random morning towards the end of February, Rodney’s phone rang. For a moment, he froze, then shook himself and picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Rodney?” The voice was breathless from excitement.

“John?!”

“Rodney, it’s over. Rodney we’re coming home.”

Rodney dropped the phone and covered his mouth with his hand so the roomful of soldiers waiting in lines behind John to call their loved ones wouldn’t hear him screaming with excitement. He danced around the room, not caring that he was acting like an idiot, but the only thought in his head was, ‘John’s coming home! John’s coming home!’

He spent the next few days cleaning his room and John’s room, put away the framed pictures, went out and restocked both of their cupboards and fridges with John’s favourite food and waited on the couch.

*          *          *

When there was the soft knock on the door, Rodney leapt up, tore open the door and stared at John standing in front of him. He looked exhausted, dark rings circling his eyes and black stubble covering his chin, his tan BDUs filthy and his shoulder slumped. They stared at each other for a moment before John gave him a small grin.

“Hey, I just came by to see if you had any beer on you.”

“You’ve got some in your own fridge. I put it in this morning.”

“Oh.”

They stared at each other for another moment before Rodney grabbed his vest, yanked him in and slammed his door shut and locked it. John’s heavy green back-pack hit the ground with a thud.

He grabbed John and held him so tight that they couldn’t breathe, but it was okay because John was clutching him like his life depended on it and had buried his face in the side of Rodney’s neck.

Rodney found that he was shaking like a leaf and his legs couldn’t hold him anymore, so he let himself drop to the ground, taking John with him. They knelt there, clutching each other and shaking, too many emotions swirling around them to put into words. But they didn’t need to say anything. ‘I missed you’. ‘Thank you for coming home’. They were all implied.

When they finally released each other for a bit, Rodney grabbed John’s face and kissed him, wanting to cry with relief at tasting the familiar lips. Once they started kissing they couldn’t stop and Rodney licked John’s lips and explored every inch of his mouth as soon as John parted his lips. He ran his hands up John’s back, aching to feel skin beneath his fingers and really let himself believe that he was here.

John broke their kiss and started pulling Rodney’s shirt up and gently biting Rodney’s neck. Rodney groaned, clutching John’s filthy hair, before common sense came back to him.

“John—John, wait. You’re exhausted. You need a shower, you need to get out of this filthy uniform and you need to eat.”

Rodney smiled as John ignored him and pulled Rodney’s shirt up even more and bent down to suck on one of his nipples. Rodney was going to stop protesting, wanting nothing more than to tear John’s clothes off him, but he felt the tremors of exhaustion running through John’s body and could see the fatigue in his eyes. Not to mention his hair was greasy and covered in sand and dust from a desert land half way across the world.

Finally, he convinced John to get up and helped him stumble to the bathroom. Not thinking that John could stay on his own two feet while having a shower, Rodney made a bath for him and took John’s clothes off and settled him into the tub before starting to wash him. John sighed and leaned back with his eyes closed. He actually fell asleep and Rodney gently prodded him awake when he pulled him out of the tub and dried him off. Steering him into the bedroom, he got John into bed and then pulled his own clothes off and got in with him. John immediately rolled over and threw an arm across Rodney’s chest and stuck a leg between his, groaning softly and happily and burying his face in Rodney’s neck. Within seconds, John was asleep.

Rodney lay awake for a while longer, hardly daring to believe that John was really here, safe and whole. He quietly chuckled to himself. He had envisioned John’s coming home to lead to hours of sex where they couldn’t even reach the bedroom. Staring down at the exhausted man in his arms, he ruefully shook his head. So much for that happening. Obviously people in those clichéd war movies had never actually come home from war where things like dirty uniforms, exhaustion and jet lag mattered.

He found that he didn’t care. They would have time for that later. He had a million things he had to tell John and a million things they had to do. But for now, John needed to sleep.

*          *          *

Rodney woke up before John did and gently untangled himself and crept out of bed.

Shrugging some clothes on, he went to the bathroom and grabbed John’s uniform and put it in a bag by the door beside his pack. Then he grabbed his wallet and ran out to the cafeteria and bought them breakfast—scrambled eggs, toast, sausages, bacon and hot coffee and came back to his room.

Stuffing it all into the microwave without actually turning it on—an old trick guaranteed to keep food hot longer—he went back into his room and pulled his clothes off.

Crawling back under the covers, he kissed John on the lips and then slowly let himself wander down John’s body, examining every inch of skin. There were a few bruises here and there and a few cuts, but no major scars or wounds.

He gently pressed kisses to the edges of each bruise and cut, running his fingers over the hair dusting John’s body. He passed John’s tags and took a moment to trace their edges, mentally thanking them for keeping up their end of the bargain. Going further down John’s body, he traced his ribs with his fingers, frowning over how prominent they were.

Deciding that he would fatten John up as soon as he woke up, he ignored his ribs for the time being and woke John up in the most pleasant way he could.

After John had gasped himself awake, he pulled Rodney over him, giving him a smirk. Rodney recognized the open invitation and wasted no time in re-familiarizing himself with the rest of John.

Half way through, Rodney realized John had suddenly fallen silent. Rodney had closed his eyes at some point, and he snapped them open and stared down at John’s face. What he saw made him freeze. John was staring off at a point over Rodney’s shoulder, his body limp and relaxed and his gaze blank.

Rodney licked his lips, gasping for breath and trying to get his body back under control.

“John?”

No response. John was still staring off into nothing.

“John!” Rodney reached over and slapped John’s cheek. With a start, John blinked and jerked slightly and stared up at Rodney.

“Why did you stop? You’re close.” John gave Rodney a smirk.

“Where were you just now?”

“What?”

“Where did you go, John?”

“What are you talking about, Rodney? I’m right here.”

“Now you are. You weren’t a minute ago. What was that?”

John rolled his eyes. “We’re kinda in the middle of something just now.”

Rodney ignored his attempts to distract him and gently pulled out, having gone almost completely soft from the shock of seeing John spaced out.

He crawled up John’s body and framed his head with his arms and stared him in the face, not letting John get away. John’s eyes were darting everywhere except for Rodney’s face.

“John, look at me.”

John yawned, still not looking at him. “I smell eggs. Did you get eggs? Shit, I haven’t had real eggs in ages. Come on, let’s get breakfast.”

Attempting to roll over, John was surprised when Rodney grabbed his shoulder, slammed him back into the mattress and grabbed his chin.

“Not until you tell me what’s wrong with you.”

John stared at him for a long time, the polite smile of confusion slowly fading and the blankness receding from his eyes, and for the first time, Rodney saw the darkness and pain that lingered in the brown depths that hadn’t been there two months ago.

“I don’t know, Rodney. Honestly, I don’t know. It happens a lot. I’m sitting somewhere and then suddenly, I’m somewhere else. I woke up in the bathroom one day, convinced I was in a bomb shelter. Another time I woke up and swore I heard gun fire so I crawled under my bed and stayed there until someone walked by and asked me what I was doing.”

John stared at him, looking so confused and filled with such pain that Rodney had to force himself not to look away. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Rodney.”

“You have PTSD. Shell shock. Severe by the sounds of it.”

“What?”

Rodney sighed and gently traced John’s ear with a finger. “I’ve been reading up on it. I watched so many interviews on CNN with soldiers who just came back and they had really bad PTSD. I didn’t know anything about it so I read up on it.” Rodney suddenly glared. “Why the hell didn’t they let you go home?”

John shrugged. “I lied on my psych evals.”

“You wanted to stay?”

“Rodney, I told you, I needed to stay and help out. Just because my head was a bit messed up didn’t mean that I could leave people to suffer. So I sucked it up and kept going. The shrinks are always under huge pressure to send us back out to the front lines so if we tell them what they want to hear, they’ll send us back out.”

“Have I mentioned I hate the military?”

“Don’t be like that.”

“I sent you away whole and happy and they send you back broken and I’m supposed to be happy about it?”

“Don’t blame the military, Rodney. Blame idiotic people who want to kill each other because they’re bored.”

Rodney signed, knowing that John was partially right. He reached up and gently ran his fingers through John’s hair. It had grown a bit over the past two months. His CO would be squawking at him soon to get a regulation hair cut again.

“How do we fix it?”

For a second Rodney blinked at him, thinking John was talking about his hair, and then he remembered what they were talking about. “We go get help.”

“I’m not going by myself and we can’t go to a military shrink together, you know that.”

“Fine. Then we do it on our own. Okay? We’ll fix this, I promise.”

John still had lingering doubts in his eyes but Rodney grabbed his chin and raised an eyebrow. “Hey, if I say I’m going to fix something, then I do, don’t I?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn straight. Now get your ass out of bed. Our eggs are going to get cold and I have about five million football games to tell you about and I set up an appointment for you to meet with the Dean at two. I want to make sure they’re still giving you credit for having finished first term when you start again in May.”

*          *          *

Just as Rodney had promised, he did try to fix it.

He got used to being a lighter sleeper and waking up every time John had a nightmare. He’d wake up and gently shake John awake, ducking his fists when John lashed out and gently murmuring reassurances to him.

When John did wake up, trembling and eyes wide, he would always be disoriented for a few minutes, not understanding why Rodney was on a medivac in a chopper with a city burning below.

Rodney would keep talking to him, reminding him where he was and that he was safe and Rodney was safe and everything was okay. Slowly, John’s eyes would wander around their bedroom, taking in the familiar sights and the fear would leave his eyes and he’d curl up around Rodney, sobbing into the side of Rodney’s neck, whispering in chocked sobs about how scared he had been and how sorry he was that he was messed up. Rodney would shush him, push his own tears back and wrap his arms and legs around John, holding him close and rocking them back and forth until he fell asleep.

Occasionally, John would have a flashback in the middle of the day and Rodney got used to grabbing John by the arm and leading him away somewhere before whoever they were with realized John was madly whispering for Rodney to get down and didn’t he hear the gunfire spattering behind that building?

Rodney would talk to John and force him to look around and remember where he was. Any loud, sudden noises would make John dive for cover and grab Rodney along the way.

Once in the middle of a seminar that John tagged along to, the visiting professor had knocked the overhead projector off the table accidently. The resulting crash had John leaping off his seat, grabbing Rodney and throwing them both on the ground, covering Rodney’s body with his own and whispering in his ear that they were going to be alright and that Rodney just had to keep his head down, all the while berating idiots who didn’t know when to turn an air raid siren on.

Rodney would loudly exclaim that ‘oh, there was the pen he had dropped and thank you, John, for helping him find it’. Then he’d say the seminar had been a riot but he was hungry and couldn’t take the old idiot’s jabbering anymore and he would drag John out.

They couldn’t watch any movies with loud explosions in it or Rodney could guarantee that John wouldn’t sleep for three nights straight and they kept their ring tones for their room phones on the quietest setting, not needing a repeat of John grabbed a nearby bottle and smashing his phone to pieces.

Overtime, John’s PTSD did calm down. He didn’t have as many flashbacks as before and sometimes weeks would go by before he had another nightmare, but never again would Rodney see an old veteran on the side of the road, loudly waving his arms and yelling that the Japs were about to start bombing and want to laugh.

*          *          *

When the summer came around, John helped Rodney mark his undergrads exams, finish his papers, experiments and exams and then they set off and went for a road trip to Vegas together. In May, John starting working on his masters again and Rodney started his third masters term.

The next year was relatively calm. They went to classes, John got readjusted to life as a student and they continued keeping their relationship hidden from the rest of the ROTC cadets and officers, and John was forced to intervene twice when Rodney’s fellow grad students threatened to get a restraining against him if he went within fifty feet of the labs ever again.

In December, Rodney got his two master degrees and John swore the process of seeing Rodney through finishing his dissertations and practicing for his defense had left John with more anxiety and paper cuts than Rodney.

Over winter break, John pretended to have mandatory training for a whole week and it wasn’t until Rodney found himself grabbed, blind folded and forced into a car that he found out John’s only mission over winter break was a surprise weekend trip to celebrate finishing his masters.

When they got back, the university gave Rodney an offer to start his PhD with them in January and it was hard to say who was prouder of the offer, Rodney or John.

John had been astounded that they would take on a 22 year old to do a PhD but Rodney had waved it off, saying that they obviously recognized brilliance when they saw it and they would be idiots to let him go.

While Rodney started taking the first few PhD courses he had to take, John worked twenty hour days to finish his own thesis and gave Rodney a taste of his own medicine. John would wake him up at random times during the night, stumbling out of bed to make sure his computer hadn’t blown up for mysterious reasons. He’d forget to put pants or shoes on and mutter math proofs under his breath while forgetting to check for traffic as he stumbled across campus streets.

Just like John had been the one anxiously sitting outside the ‘interrogation chamber’ during Rodney’s defense, their roles reversed in April when Rodney finally threatened to burn his thesis if he didn’t go do his damn defense already. When John half fell out of the room, still talking and looking more shell shocked than he had when he had come home from war, Rodney had grabbed him, hugged him and taken him out for dinner and given him the best blow job he could to celebrate when they got back home.

During the summer John worked as an instructor at boot camp for a few weeks, making enough money to let both him and Rodney fly up to Canada to see Jeannie for a week before summer term started. They both immensely enjoyed the fact that they were using the money John got from the US military to go on vacation together.

When May rolled around, Rodney continued taking his classes, started making noises about the millions of ideas he had for his PhD thesis and found new and creative ways to avoid having to teach first year physics classes in September. Since Rodney had finished the course work for his PhD, the university had hired him as an assistant professor to start teaching while finishing his doctorate.

John had gone to his thesis advisor and begged him to talk to the university about being allowed to do his PhD here. His advisor had blinked at him and then raised an eyebrow, saying he had thought John had already registered for his first round of courses and that the university had been prepared to give him the green light half way through his defense.

On December 3rd, 1992 John was writing the last exam of his second term of his PhD, and half way around the world, Siad Barre’s Marxist government fell and the Republic of Somalia was plunged into chaos.

Rodney had gotten so used to not watching CNN and being blissfully unaware of the rest of the world again that he only noticed something was wrong when he saw the first cab full of ROTC officers leaving campus one early Saturday morning dressed in their tan BDU’s and their green packs slung over their shoulders.

He raced to his dorm, turned on the television and watched as Somalia slowly fell to pieces. Children as young as seven armed with AK-47s and shooting each other for scraps of abandoned, torched cars to bring to their war lords. Buildings exploding, cars burning, people running through the streets, dragging their children and their most precious belongings with them. Everybody had a gun. Everywhere was chaos.

Rodney barely heard the door open and hardly registered John turning off the television. John stood between him and the television, his face white and that familiar white envelope clutched in his hand.

Rodney stared at him. They were silent for a long moment, neither of them wanting to start an old fight again and knowing that the end result would be the same.

“I suppose they don’t care that you have your masters now and are working on your PhD and are far too brilliant to lose in combat?”

John smiled tightly. “No, they don’t. They just care about me having good aim and nerves of steel.”

Rodney swallowed hard. “When?”

“Three weeks.”

“So we still have winter break.”

“Yup.”

Rodney briefly closed his eyes and lay his head on the back of the couch. He heard John walking over and felt the couch dip as John sat down beside him and let himself be pulled into his arms, laying his head on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry I—”

“Don’t. It’s okay. I understand why. I just wish you could be in two places at once. Or better yet, I wish you could help in a way that wouldn’t get you killed.”

John shook him lightly. “Hey, positive thinking, remember?”

Rodney tried to smile but only managed to get a lump in his throat. He turned his face into John’s neck, not wanting him to see the tears he was fighting back.

*          *          *

Three weeks later they were sitting on the couch again, holding each other and waiting for John’s cab to pull up. The only difference was that there was a small cat sitting beside them, curled up and sleeping.

“Does she have a name?” Rodney asked.

John shrugged. “We’ll think of something.”

“If you think a cat is a good enough substitute for you then you’re sadly mistaken.”

“But she’ll be good company until I’m home, right?”

It was on the tip of Rodney tongue to say that if John wanted to do him any favors he would make sure that Rodney didn’t need to find a substitute at all, but that would only lead to anger, sadness and another useless fight.

Then there was the honk outside their window and Rodney gave him a tight hug, kissed his tags and his lips and walked him to the door.

He didn’t stop to watch John walk down the hallway and thud down the stairs, instead, he shut the door and slid down against it, staring at the cat, who had lifted her head and was staring at him.

“Welcome to my other life, Cat.”

*          *          *

Not allowing himself to wallow in self pity, Rodney threw himself back into the familiar routine of keeping busy. He cleaned John’s room, threw out all his perishable food, put all their pictures back around their apartment, threw out all the food that John wouldn’t be eating and Rodney refused to eat and kept the television off.

He spent his time in the labs, avoiding his fellow idiots who dared to call themselves scientists, glaring at General Renton behind his back and sitting in his apartment with Cat.

He dutifully watched football games, wrote down funny things, clipped amusing articles out of newspapers and hilariously wrong papers out of science journals and spent his time highlighting the wrong bits and putting them in a drawer to show John when he came home.

He went over and washed John’s clothes and aired out his room, and only watched CNN when he couldn’t resist the urge. He pored over newspapers, irritated when there was only a tiny article on Somalia stuck under an advertisement for a furniture sale, complaining to Cat that obviously, that paper had to readjust its priorities.

She just blinked at him and stretched out over the Entertainment section and didn’t point out that Rodney hadn’t ever touched a newspaper before John had left for Kuwait.

He slowly watched winter turn to spring, ticked off the days on his and John’s calendar and waited for phone calls and letters from John and his usual calls from Jeannie. He found that life was more bearable with Cat around, since he had someone to talk to and watch television with. He even brought Cat to the labs and movies with him, thanking John for picking a little runt who was small enough to fit inside his jacket without anybody noticing.

*          *          *

And here they were, thirteen days left until John would come home. Rodney would have worried over John having to do another tour, but Rodney had carefully watched the interviews Clinton gave shortly after his inauguration in January—another thing he had never done before—and cheered out loud and nearly hugged his television when Clinton announced that his plans were to decrease the number of US troops in Somalia from now until June and replace them with UN troops.

Cat had just blinked at him, still half asleep and Rodney had pointed at the screen and gleefully explained to the small feline that that meant that John would be coming home in May, and that they both loved Clinton despite the fact that neither Cat nor Rodney could vote in the States.

Thirteen days left. Rodney could hardly believe it. They had been lucky. John had called him two months ago and said that due to the reduction in US troops, he was being sent home at the end of May rather than June. Rodney had danced around his kitchen as he crossed off the June date and filled in the square on May 20th with ‘COMING HOME DAY’.

“And if John complains about your name, we’ll just explain that it’s his own damn fault for never bringing it up, and besides, you’re used to it now, aren’t you?”

She kept purring as he scratched behind her ears. He reached for the remote and flipped the channel, by-passing CNN and settling on Jeopardy.

Ten minutes later, the phone rang. He glanced at the time and realized it was about time for Jeannie to call.

Reaching over and trying not to dump Cat off his lap, Rodney picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Is this Rodney McKay?”

Rodney frowned. It was probably some idiot from administration, irritated that he had booked all the lab time for the rest of the week. Well, snoozers losers. It wasn’t his problem that the others weren’t smart enough to book their lab time in advance.

“Yeah.” He said carefully, getting ready to give the secretary a piece of his mind. They had already had this conversation three times and he had checked all the guidelines before and there was nothing written in there about booking in advance.

“Are you Captain John Sheppard’s emergency contact?”


	3. Sweet Denial

Rodney froze. For a minute, he couldn’t speak. Everything around him jerked to a halt, even Alex Trebek’s mouth was moving in slow motion and nothing coming out sounded like English.

“Yes,” he managed to whisper.

“I’m Lieutenant-Colonel Anders. I’m very sorry to inform you that Captain Sheppard’s chopper was shot down yesterday. A team retrieved him and airlifted him to the field hospital here but he is badly wounded.”

Rodney was shaking his head, his hands numb and feeling so faint that he thought he’d pass out.

“That’s not right.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s not right.” Rodney whispered, willing him to understand. “He’s coming home in thirteen days.”

“Are you a relative, Mr. McKay?”

“No. Best friend.”

“Does Captain Sheppard have any next of kin?”

“No.”

“Are you his health care proxy, then?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll need you to fly down right away. There are some medical decisions that have to be made and Captain Sheppard is in a medically induced coma.”

“He’s coming home in thirteen days. Thirteen days, seven hours and forty-seven minutes.”

“Mr. McKay, you’re in shock. It’s completely understandable. I need you to get a piece of paper and pen, please.”

“What?”

“Paper and pen, please.”

Rodney numbly felt around on the table beside his couch and pulled out a scrap piece of paper and a pen. “Okay.”

The Colonel went on to tell him slowly and clearly what flight he had to take and when, and what hospital John would be flown to for further treatment. He told him what room John would be in and what ID he had to bring with him, who he would have to speak to, and reminded him multiple times to bring a copy of the health care proxy with him.

Rodney wrote it down, not registering a word of it. The Colonel eventually hung up and Rodney continued sitting there, a pen in his numb hands and the phone stuck to his ear.

It wasn’t until Cat sat up in his lap and licked his face that Rodney snapped out of it.

Suddenly, Alex was speaking normally again, the words on the paper in front of him made sense and he bolted off the couch. He barely made it to the bathroom in time before he threw up.

Leaning over the toilet, he reached up and flushed and pulled himself up and soaked his head under the faucet.

John was wounded. Thirteen days to go and the idiot had gotten himself shot down now.  Staring at himself in the mirror, Rodney felt a flash of anger race through him and then grabbed his razor and threw it at the mirror, watching it shatter.

Then he felt sick again and wanted nothing more than to curl up on the floor and sob, but he couldn’t. John was wounded and needed him.

Suddenly anxious, Rodney raced out of the bathroom and stared throwing some clothes and other necessities into a bag.

Grabbing Cat, her litter box, toys, food and bowls, he raced out of his apartment and knocked on the annoying biology grad student’s door, praying she was home.

She opened her door and smirked when she first saw him but taking one look at his soaking wet, pale face, she stepped aside, motioning him inside. He put down all of Cat’s stuff and put Cat into her arms. He dug into his pockets, pulled out his keys and shoved them into her hand.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

“Bad. They wouldn’t say. I have to fly to Landstuhl.”

“Germany?”

“Yeah. They’re transferring him there. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

“Whatever, doesn’t matter. Have you called a cab?”

While Rodney stood there, shaking, she called a cab, called the airport and made sure he had a seat booked and wrote down the address from the hospital which Rodney still had clutched in his hands and told him to leave her his keys and she would look after their apartments and send him new clothes when he needed them.

Then she shoved him out the door, brought him back to his room and put his bag into his hands and pushed him towards the door.

Before Rodney stumbled down the stairs, he yelled back that she should call Jeannie and tell her what happened and tell the rest of the university where he had gone and in exchange, she could auction off all the lab time he had booked up.

She smirked, used Cat’s paw to wave at him and told him to get going already.

*          *          *

Twenty hours later, he stumbled out of a cab in front of a hospital whose name he couldn’t even pronounce, clutching his bag and the piece of paper.

Going inside, he was relieved to discover that everybody spoke English and that they had been expecting him. After checking his ID and giving him a cup of coffee, a nurse sat him down in a chair and told him to wait while she found Major Clayton for him. Rodney had protested and said that he wanted to see John right away, but she had insisted.

Finally Major Clayton arrived and sat down beside Rodney.

“Mr. McKay, I’m not going to beat around the bush. He’s in a bad way. His chopper erupted into flames when it crashed but he managed to drag himself out in time. His hands are burned and some other areas of his body were burned but those will heal. The major problem is that he broke his back when he landed.”

Rodney blinked. “How bad is it?”

“Right now, it’s bad. Now, there is a procedure we can try. With any luck, it’ll be able to reverse the damage and only make the paralysis temporary.”

Rodney blinked. “Paralysis?” The word didn’t even sound English.

“Yes, Mr. McKay. If we don’t do the surgery, he will remain paralyzed with a small chance of recovering the use of his legs in a few years.”

“So do the surgery.”

“You don’t understand, Mr. McKay. The procedure is experimental and highly dangerous and there is a very high chance that it will make the nerve damage worse. If that would happen, there is no chance that Captain Sheppard will ever be able to recover.”

“How high of a chance?”

“About 73%.”

Rodney sat there, already knowing what he would say. If it were his life, he would refuse the surgery. With that high of a risk factor, he would take his own chances. But this wasn’t his life. He knew how much John loved running around and being active and he knew that if there was even a small chance that this surgery could make things better, he would take it and say to hell with the odds.

Rodney was tempted to say no. After all, John was in a coma and wouldn’t know about it until afterwards, but Rodney couldn’t do that. This was why John had put his name down on that piece of paper, giving Rodney the power to make life altering decisions for him when he couldn’t. He had to do what John would want him to do.

“Do the surgery.”

*          *          *

Seventeen hours later Rodney decided he hated hospital chairs and had drunk enough coffee to not sleep for the next seventeen days.

Every time the door to the OR opened, he was up and demanding to know if they knew anything about how things were going, but they always said it was too soon to tell and he would have to wait for Major Clayton to finish.

Finally, the Major pushed open the doors, pulling his gown and mask off, looking exhausted. He glanced up at Rodney as he walked towards him, sadness in his eyes.

Rodney knew before the Major even told him.

“It didn’t work, did it?”

“I’m very sorry. We tried our best but nerves are tricky things.”

“I knew the risks going in. John would have wanted to try.” Rodney clenched his jaw, determined not to cry. “What does this mean?”

The Major’s eyes were pained. “I’m very sorry, but Captain Sheppard will never walk again.”

*          *          *

Rodney leaned on the edge of John’s bed, his elbows on the lumpy mattress and his butt already asleep from sitting on another one of those stupid plastic seats. There were tubes everywhere and thick white bandages covering John’s hands, face and parts of his chest. Rodney clutched the tags pressed into his hands. Major Clayton had given them to him before starting surgery, saying they would be in the way and Rodney should hang on to them. Rodney stared at John, listening to the ventilator quietly breathing for him and the reassuring beep of the heart monitor. They would keep him in a coma for two more days to let the burns heal and for John not to be in so much pain when he woke up. Rodney was privately glad. The longer John was in a coma, the longer he would remain blissfully unaware of the fact that he would never be a soldier again or walk again.

Those were two things he wasn’t looking forward to telling him. He had convinced Major Clayton to allow him to deliver the news in private before the Major would come in and answer any questions John had about his recovery.

He reached up and gently ran a finger over John’s shaved head. It was strange seeing him without any hair. Big chunks of it had burned off and the nurses had decided to shave it all off to make treatment easier and to give all his hair an equal chance to grow back.

“Well, looks like this is what you get for avoiding regulation hair cuts all these years. I told you to trim it occasionally, didn’t I? Damn punk.”

Reaching over, he gently stroked the tip of John’s pinky, the only part of his right hand not covered in a bandage.

“We’ll get through this, you hear? Maybe we can’t fix it, but we’ll get through this. We’ll figure something out, I promise. You just hurry up and heal so we can get started.”

Glancing around their private room he made sure no nurses were nearby and then leaned over and quickly kissed John on the lips.

It was only after he sat down that he realized that it didn’t matter anymore. John wasn’t military anymore. As soon as he could talk, he would be medically discharged and military regulations would never apply to him again. Then Rodney could kiss him anytime he wanted.

Rodney was disgusted with the thrill that ran through him at that thought and he lay his head down beside John’s arm and pushed that thought away.

*          *          *

“Have I mentioned I hate hospital coffee? The food isn’t too bad but the coffee absolutely sucks.”

Rodney sat down on his chair with a huff and put his newest styrofoam cup of coffee on the table beside him. He glanced at John and clenched his jaw when he saw that he still wasn’t moving.

They had taken him off the ventilator and started the process of waking his body up yesterday but John was being his typical lazy self and refused to be prodded into waking up.

“You know, you aren’t being paid for this. And nobody is here besides me. If you’re waiting to make a whole dramatic scene, then you’ll be just as disappointed if you wake up now than if you would wake up next week. And if you do wake up next week, you’ll not only have to deal with being disappointed, you’ll have to deal with me kicking your a—”

A sudden, quiet moan from the bed made the words catch in his throat. He nearly knocked over his coffee as he jerked upright and gently grabbed John’s pinky.

“John?”

John’s eyebrows seemed to twitch slightly and his eyes seemed to move behind their lids.

“Come on, wake up already, you lazy punk.”

Slowly, John opened his eyes and they stared at each other. Almost immediately, John’s eyes flooded with confusion.

“Rdny? Wa dun h-here?” John whispered, his voice scratchy and thin.

“Okay, I realize you’ve been hanging out with grunts for the past few months who find any words that aren’t monosyllabic or resemble mutters very taxing on their vocal chords, but you have to try using your big words.”

“Wa dun here?” John whispered again, wincing slightly.

Rodney grabbed a cup of water with a straw and held it to John’s lips and let him drink a few sips. Then he called a nurse to tell her that John had woken up before focusing back on John.

He gently stroked his pinky. “John, I know you’re pretty confused right now. You’re not in Somalia anymore, you’re in Germany. In a hospital. Do you remember anything?”

John frowned and licked his lips. “Schober….” He took a few raspy breaths. “Down.”

Rodney nodded. “Yeah. Your chopper was shot down and you crashed. It was pretty bad and they airlifted you to a field hospital and then here. You’ve been in a medically induced coma for the burns for a few days.”

John nodded slightly. “When….beder?”

The words Rodney had rehearsed a thousand times disappeared and he just gaped at John, not wanting to tell him. Just at that moment, Major Clayton came into the room and Rodney released John’s fingers as quickly as he could without making the motion obvious. Old habits died hard.

“Good morning, Captain. I’m thrilled you decided to join us. Mr. McKay here was getting worried.”

“Irritated. I was irritated. Not worried.”

The Major went up to John’s bed and started assessing his vitals and scribbling on his chart. He asked John a few yes or no questions about his pain and appetite and then glanced at Rodney.

“Did you—”

Rodney coughed and avoided John’s gaze. “No. Not yet. Give me a minute.”

The Major nodded and squeezed Rodney’s shoulder. “Take all the time you need. Send a nurse to get me when you’re ready.”

With a smile for both of them, he disappeared through the door and gently shut it behind him.

Rodney spent a few minutes staring at his styrofoam cup. “You know, I don’t know if you heard my rant about the coffee here while you were out of it—”

John stared at him. “What….tell me?”

Rodney used his fingernails to put some dents into the styrofoam, avoiding John’s gaze. John patiently stared at him until Rodney realized his hands were shaking too much to properly finish the octahedron design he had started. Slowly putting the cup down, he leaned over and grabbed hold of John’s hand.

“John, the burns weren’t the worst of your injuries. You—you—” Rodney coughed and berated himself for having agreed to do this. “You—when you were shot down—the chopper—the chopper landed badly. Well, to be fair, crashing isn’t the same as landing is it? So maybe we shouldn’t say the chopper landed badly. But it wasn’t like you landed it badly either. What do you call a well intentioned crappy landing in military jargon?”

John was looking at him patiently, probably too worn out to tell him to get to the point. He took a deep breath, staring into John’s patient eyes, dreading whatever would come into them. “You broke your back. Badly. They tried doing surgery but things didn’t go so well. The Major says you’ll never walk again.”

There. It was out.

And John’s eyes hadn’t changed. In fact, he gave Rodney a small smile. “Don’t…worry so much, Rdny. Doctors wrong…all the time. I’ll be walking again….no time, you’ll….see.”

Grinning at him, John yawned and promptly closed his eyes and fell back asleep.

Rodney was left staring at him, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

*          *          *

“Anything?”

“Sure.”

A sigh. “Captain, I need a yes or a no answer. Can you feel it when I tap your left knee like this?”

“Whatever.”

Rodney pinched the bridge of his nose and resisted the urge to throw his coffee cup at John.

In the past week, John had been fighting tooth and nail to stay in denial about his paralysis. Major Clayton had come in and spoken to him about it, with John mostly keeping that polite and charming smile on his face and nodding from time to time, without a word registering.

Anytime Rodney tried talking to him about it, he would steer the conversation another way or act like Rodney was the one being an idiot and couldn’t see that this was just temporary. Everyday a nurse would come by and try to coax John into starting some of his physiotherapy for his hands and upper body. John would do fine with those. He’d eagerly watch them change his bandages, the skin underneath them starting to look a more and more healthy color as the days went on.

But as soon as the nurse would start randomly tapping his legs, asking him if he felt this or that or asked him to wiggle his toes, John would be evasive, rude or feign tiredness and roll over and go to sleep.

It was driving Rodney insane. Major Clayton had told him John’s reaction wasn’t uncommon, especially for soldiers who were used to spending their lives depending on their bodies to function properly. He said it would just take time. Rodney said that he couldn’t afford for it to take time, because pretty soon, Rodney would go mental and then they would both have problems they couldn’t fix.

“Alright, can you wiggle your toes for me, Captain?”

“You know, I really would, but I’m getting pretty tired.” A huge, fake yawn was apparently supposed to sell that point. Along with that charming smile.

Rodney clenched his jaw and his fist, wanting nothing more than to reach over, smack John and yell at him to start accepting reality.

Knowing that he couldn’t do that — yet — he turned around, stormed out of the room, slammed the door shut and walked back to the hotel.

His phone rang fifteen times but every time Rodney saw that it was the phone from John’s room and not the front desk, he let it ring and didn’t pick it up.

*          *          *

The next morning he dragged himself back, sitting in his chair, drinking his coffee and listening to John swearing on his life that he totally felt her touching his left ankle.

“I was touching your right ankle, Captain.”

“Yeah, yeah. My right. That’s what I said. I really felt it that time. And right then too. Yup. Got that one.”

“I only touched your ankle once, Captain.”

“You know, I’m getting tired again. All this touchy business is really taxing. You mind if we quit for today?”

*          *          *

Three weeks later, Major Clayton sat down with Rodney. He told him that John’s burns had mostly healed and while there would be minimal scarring on his arms and hands and the side of his neck, they should be fine. His physical therapy for his hands and arms was also going well and if it weren’t for the fact that John was refusing to start his other therapy, he could be discharged.

“What other therapy? That touching business isn’t therapy.”

“No. That’s just a way to help get patients to accept their paralysis. We can’t release John without him showing us that he has learned the basic skills to take care of himself.”

“Like what?” Rodney found himself vaguely irritated that they had stopped calling John by his rank a few days before. They said it was another way to help the transition, but it only made John pissier when medics whom he outranked called him by his first name.

“Mr. McKay, I don’t think you realize how much John will have to change his life. He’ll have to readjust and re-learn nearly everything. Not only will his living arrangements have to change, but he will have to learn how to use wheelchair, how to get in and out of bed, to and from the chair, how to stop, how to reach for things without falling over, how to get back into his chair if he does fall over, how to control his bladder and bowel movements, what to eat and what to drink, what illnesses and side-effects he has to watch out for, nearly everything. We have experts here who can teach John how to do these things and can teach you the things you will also need to learn.”

Rodney blinked. He hadn’t honestly thought about going back home. About what his and John’s life would be like. He had been so focused on John’s stubbornness that he hadn’t stopped to think about the future.

He stared at the Major. “He’s not going to like that.”

“No, but I just wanted to tell you that that’s where we’re going. We’ll get there, Mr. McKay. Just give it time.”

Rodney nodded. Just as the Major was about to stand up, Rodney glanced up at him.

“Can you call me Rodney?”

“I’m sorry?”

“If you’re calling him John, can you call me Rodney?”

The Major nodded. “If it helps, you can call me Dr. Clayton, Rodney.”

“It would. Thank you.”

*          *          *

At two in the morning, Rodney’s phone rang. He groggily fumbled for the phone and stared at the caller ID. The moment he saw that it was the hospital’s front desk, he became wide awake.

“Hello?”

“Mr. McKay? This is Lieutenant Haggers.”

The touchy feely nurse, as John called her. “Is John alright?”

“The alarms in his room went off about twenty minutes ago. He took out his catheter and unhooked himself from the monitors and fell out of bed. He’s in a corner, obviously distraught but refuses to allow anybody near him. He keeps calling for you, but even if he didn’t, we thought you might be able to help. We would prefer not to use force to get him back into bed, or sedating him.”

Rodney didn’t remember even hanging up the phone. He stuffed his feet into his shoes, grabbed his keys and wallet and sprinted the four blocks to the hospital without bothering to get a cab.

He ran through the front doors and to John’s room and burst in, gasping for breath, his hair all over the place and only wearing his shoes, boxers and a rumpled math Olympics T-shirt that his biology neighbor had sent over yesterday.

John was huddled in a corner, his face pressed into the wall and both his arms on either side of his face, blocking him from view. His legs were splayed out in front of him, lying at awkward angles and so obviously non-responsive that Rodney felt a sick lurch in his stomach and had to look away for a moment.

Lieutenant Haggers was crouching a few feet away and glanced up with obvious relief when she saw Rodney. She came over and glanced at John. “I found him like this after the alarms went off. He doesn’t want to speak to anybody. He only said your name once about two minutes before I called you, but that’s it. I’ll give you two some time but if he gets violent or he’s not responding, call me and we’ll sedate him and put him back to bed. He’s going to catch a cold on that floor and that won’t help.”

Rodney nodded. She pressed a blanket into his hands and a small portable call button and then quietly let herself out of the room.

Rodney slowly walked around the bed and went over to where John was. As he got closer, he realized John wasn’t making a sound but he was so tense that Rodney was afraid to touch him.

He crouched down about a foot away from him and gently shook out the blanket.

“Hey. Haggers said you were being a two year old. What’s with you, huh? You think this will get you out of her sessions? I think you’ll have to use a crowbar on her before she stays away. I’ll go buy you one tomorrow, okay? I’ll paint it pink and sneak it in as an early birthday present for you. With a bow on it, nobody will ever know.”

He was rambling on purpose, waiting for John to face him or laugh or do something, but he stayed the way he was, his back tense and his face pressed into the wall with his arms hiding him.

Rodney reached forward. “Okay, I’m going to put the blanket around your shoulders, alright? You’re going to catch a cold and then I’m going to catch a cold and you know how much of a bitch I can be when I get sick.” Draping the blanket around John’s shoulders, he moved back and waited another moment.

When John didn’t even twitch, Rodney sighed and changed tactics.

He knew that until then, he and John had been walking a fine line at the hospital. Nobody suspected they were lovers simply because most conservative military personnel didn’t think that anybody gay could really be a soldier and behave so ‘normally’. They had readily accepted that Rodney was John’s best friend and had been for years and that was it. If some of the staff did suspect, they hadn’t voiced their opinions on that matter and continued to treat Rodney as John’s sole relative.

Deciding that the military could take their prejudice and shove it up their asses, and besides, John had given them all he would ever give them, Rodney reached over and pulled John into his arms.

It wasn’t easy. John first tried to fight him off but Rodney was firm and held on to him, ignoring the lashing fists and angry grunts. Finally John stopped fighting him off and stayed in a tense ball, curled up in Rodney’s arms, his own arms still hiding his face.

Rodney shifted on the ground and leaned against the wall, tucking the blanket around John and under his bare legs. Rodney couldn’t help but stare a bit at the pale, white legs that didn’t move to curl under the blankets and didn’t twitch as Rodney arranged the blanket over them.

Then he went back to wrapping his arms around John and slowly rocking them back and forth, resting his chin on John’s shaved head and marveling over the fact that he didn’t have any hair tickling his nose.

They stayed like that for a long time until the tension started draining out of John and John relaxed, his arms coming down and wrapping around Rodney. John buried his face in Rodney’s neck like he always did and took a deep breath.

“I fell out of bed,” he whispered.

“I heard. If you wanted a beer so badly, you should have said something. Besides, the liquor store closes at eleven so even if you’d gotten there you would have been out of luck.”

John didn’t laugh which made Rodney realize that this was something very serious.

“I thought I had to pee. I was sick of the catheter. My hands are good and I’ve been doing my exercises and the bathroom’s just across from my bed, right? So I took the catheter out and the IV and all the other crap and I figure it’s about time I exercise my legs a bit.

I pushed myself up and then—then I tried swinging my legs around and they wouldn’t go. They just wouldn’t go. I tried harder and they still wouldn’t go and then I overbalanced and fell out of bed. Then I tried using my legs to push myself up and they wouldn’t go again. I was screaming at them in my head to move, and they just wouldn’t, Rodney. They wouldn’t. And then I reached down and hit them and I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel a thing. They were just there. Useless and not doing anything.” John took a deep breath and it caught on a sob. “They wouldn’t go, Rodney. They just wouldn’t go.”

Rodney squeezed his eyes shut, feeling tears running down his own face. “I know, John. I know.” He dropped a kiss on John’s forehead.

Rodney felt his neck getting wet from John’s tears and felt the sobs running through him. He heard John sob over and over into his neck: “They wouldn’t go, Rodney. They just wouldn’t go.”

All he could do was hold him and whisper that he knew, that John would be okay, that they would figure this out. They _would_ figure this out.


	4. Finding New Variables

John didn’t say much of anything for the next three days. He did his arm exercises when asked, he raised his arms when blood was drawn, he leaned forward when his scrubs were changed, but he hardly said a word.

It was killing Rodney.

He knew that John blamed him. The morning after John had been forced out of his denial, Rodney had fidgeted around, folding and refolding the sweater in his arms as he stared out of the hospital window.

He knew he had to tell John the truth. So after nearly tearing the sweater in half, he turned around and blurted out that he had told them to do the surgery and that he had known the chances were so low and that if they hadn’t done the surgery, then maybe, maybe, John would have a chance at walking again.

John had stared at him, his face blank. Rodney wanted to run out of the room and avoid the fight that was about to start, but knew he couldn’t be that much of a coward.

It wasn’t like John could run away if he wanted to.

John stared at him for a few more moments until he wordlessly pat his blankets, urging Rodney to come and sit.

They stared at each other for a long moment, John’s eyes filled with sadness and Rodney’s with worry.

“I’m not mad, Rodney.”

“What?”

“I’m not mad. How can I be? You made the choice that I wanted you to make. It wasn’t what you would have chosen, was it?”

“No. Not with those low chances.”

“But you knew that I would want to take it and that’s why you said yes to the surgery.”

“If I hadn’t then—”

John leaned forward and put his hand over Rodney’s mouth. “Don’t start with the what-ifs. I have plenty of them that are a lot worse than the decision you made.”

Rodney stared at him. “You’re really not mad?”

“No. You did what I wanted you to do.”

“Why are you okay with this?”

John let out a strangled laugh. “Okay? Rodney, I’m — I’m so not okay that I don’t even have the words. I keep thinking this is a nightmare that I’m going to wake up from. I’m just numb. I don’t get it, Rodney. I don’t — I just don’t get it.”

“Get what? Why this happened?”

“No. That’s a dumb question. I don’t get how I’m going to do this. What I’m going to do when I’m not numb. When I have to get out of this bed.”

Rodney grabbed his hand and gently ran his thumb over his knuckles. “We’ll figure that out. I promise. We’ll figure it out.”

John stared at him. “You and I both know we have no idea what we’re doing and if I weren’t so numb and — and not in such a weird place in my head, then I’d freak about it. All I do know is that I’m not mad. And you have to stop blaming yourself. Even if I never walk again, it’s not your fault. You made the right choice, Rodney and I love you for that.”

Rodney nodded and squeezed John’s hand, feeling an enormous weight being lifted off his shoulder.

Immediately, he felt guilty. John had erased his own dilemma but couldn’t even begin to face his own.

Taking a breath, Rodney stared out the far window and decided that John wouldn’t have to face any of it alone. No matter what it took or how long it took, Rodney would be there.

*          *          *

Lieutenant Haggers gave Rodney an expectant look. He couldn’t move. He should have expected this, he knew. He just didn’t ever put the two things together in his head. Wheelchairs were fine. John was fine. Wheelchairs with John in them weren’t fine.

He stared at it.

Suddenly, a wave of panic shot up his spine and he stepped back from the chair, as if that would make it disappear.

This wheelchair would be a part of the rest of their lives, and for the first time, it hit Rodney that he had absolutely no idea how to make it fit.

He realized Lieutenant Haggers was frowning and asking him if he was alright, but he couldn’t tear his eyes off the chair long enough to even give her a reassuring smile and say that he was fine.

Instead, he muttered something about needing a second and stumbled out of the room. He brushed past concerned nurses and ignored Lieutenant Haggers calling after him.

All he could see was that chair.

He finally stumbled into an empty room and locked the door behind him. He slid down the back of the door, sitting sprawled out on the floor.

He realized he was shaking.

He couldn’t do this. There was no way he could do this. He had a hard enough time dealing with his own life and his relationship with John. There was no way he could take up the responsibility of caring for a paraplegic too.

He didn’t even know the first thing about paraplegics. What were they supposed to eat? How were they supposed to pee?

The worst part was that John didn’t know what he was doing either, but he was depending on Rodney — trusting him — to figure it out.

And Rodney had no clue.

His panicked gaze shot around the room until it landed on the phone. Shakily getting to his feet, he stumbled to the phone and dialed Canada.

He listened to it ring a few times until a sleepy woman answered the phone with a groggy “Hello?”

He wondered why she sounded so tired, and only then remembered about the time difference.

“Jeannie?”

He heard a pause. “Mer? Is that you?” He heard the shuffling of sheets being pushed aside and heard a door opening as Jeannie left Caleb to sleep and stepped out into the hallway in her bare feet.

“Yeah.” His voice was trembling.

Suddenly, she sounded much more awake. “Oh, my god, Mer! Where are you? Are you still in Germany? How’s John? Oh, my god, how’s John?!”

Rodney realized he was clutching the phone tight enough to hurt his hand but he didn’t let go. Jeannie was something he knew. Jeannie was something solid in this new world of chaos that he and John had landed in.

“He’s — he’s numb.”

“What? Mer, what does that mean?”

Rodney had to struggle to remember that Jeannie didn’t know what had happened to John.

“He broke his back, Jeannie. His helicopter crashed and he broke his back.” Once Rodney started talking, he couldn’t seem to stop. He realized he had started crying at some point but couldn’t care less. He felt even more panicked and scared than he had before he had come into the room.

“He broke his back and he can’t walk and they asked me if I wanted them to do surgery and I said yes but it didn’t go well so now he can’t walk for sure, but John says he doesn’t blame me but now I don’t know what to do, Jeannie. I just don’t know what to do.” He scrubbed his sleeve over his eyes but he was still sobbing, feeling more confused and scared than when he had gotten that phone call.

“Mer, calm down, okay? Calm down. Shit, John’s a paraplegic?”

Rodney nodded, still sobbing. “Yeah and I don’t know what to do, Jeannie. I’m scared but John’s scared so I can’t be scared, but I really am.”

“So there’s nothing going on in the lower half? Nothing at all?”

“N — no. Nothing.”

“Okay. Okay. Mer, you can do this. We can do this. You have to listen to me, okay?”

He nodded again, still crying.

“Do you want to stay with John? And I mean, really stay with John?”

“Of course I do! He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. You think someone like him comes along twice in one lifetime?”

Jeannie laughed. “His brains and his looks? Not a chance.” Then she became serious again. “Okay. If you really want to do this, you can, Mer. Okay? You have to believe that.”

“How, Jeannie? I don’t know the first thing about taking care of a paraplegic! I don’t know what John will need and how I can do things for him! I don’t know how to give someone a bath and I don’t know how to push a wheelchair!”

“Mer, quit getting hysterical. Let me think.”

Rodney waited, hiccupping and trying to stop shaking. Jeannie would figure something out. She had to.

“Okay. I think I got it. You’re a physicist, right? A scientist?”

“What the hell does —”

“Just go with it, Mer. You’re a scientist, right?”

“Yeah…?”

“Okay. So you’re running an experiment and you’re generating good data and suddenly, you start getting all sorts of wonky readings, right? Why?”

Rodney brain immediately switched from panic mode to science mode. “Faulty equipment, calculation errors, using wrong variables, there’s hundreds of possible errors.”

“Right, and to make the experiment a success, you can do two things. You can either throw the wonky readings away, sweep them under the carpet and pretend they never existed because they’re too difficult to deal with, or…”

“Or you can try to adjust for your possible source of errors and try the experiment again and keep trying until all of your readings are within acceptable ranges. What the hell does this have to do with John?”

“Everything, Mer! Think about it. John’s disability is the equivalent to suddenly generating wonky readings. You can’t get rid of the readings—since you can’t force John’s leg to work properly again — but you don’t want to ditch the whole experiment, so you have to adjust your lives and try to make John’s disability part of your normal life.”

Rodney stared at the far wall, his mind already three steps ahead.

“I need to learn how to take care of him, Jeannie. That’s what I have to do. I have to make them teach me what I need to know and then I have to practice.”

“Exactly. And maybe John won’t be in a good enough place mentally to help out with that, but — ”

“But even if it’s his experiment too, he’s just responsible for the math. But I can handle the math. I can fix the faulty equipment and I can check the calculations and readjust our variables. I can do this, Jeannie.”

She laughed, sounding relieved and worried at the same time. “That’s the spirit, Mer. Don’t let anybody tell you that you and John can’t make this work.”

He snorted. “Nobody tells scientists what to do, Jeannie.”

“Damn straight.”

After they had hung up, Rodney scrubbed his face with his sleeve and stood up straighter. He had a mission now. A direction. He knew what he had to do.

He spun around and marched out of the room, looking for Lieutenant Haggers and that wheelchair.

He had an experiment to save.

*          *          *

Ten minutes later, he was once more back to staring at the Lieutenant and the wheelchair. What he really wanted to do was run out of the room, but he forced that panic aside. He had to do this. He had to pay attention and learn and practice. Sloppiness and fear never saved anybody’s experiments.

“Can I — can I try it?”

The Lieutenant nodded. “Sure. Hop in.”

Rodney gingerly sat down, having to force himself not to jump right back up. He slowly put his feet on the foot rests and stared straight ahead. He was sure the strangeness was mostly in his head, but he couldn’t imagine John sitting in one of these for the rest of his life.

God. _The rest of his life_. He pushed that thought away as soon as it came.

No fear. No panic.

He just had to focus on fixing his wonky readings. This chair would fix one of them. Therefore, it was a good thing. A necessary thing.

He blinked and realized Haggers was giving him a slightly concerned look. He tried a wobbly smile and then asked her how to make the thing move. She showed him where the brakes were, how to detach the arm rests or foot rests and then asked him to wheel himself forward a bit. Rodney grabbed the wheels, moved them forward and nearly fell out of the chair when his sweater got caught.

He stumbled up and the Lieutenant grabbed him. “Shit. How is John supposed to do this?”

“Practice. It’s why we’re transferring him over to rehab today. Using the wheelchair is one of the easier things he’ll have to learn.”

Rodney stared down at the wheelchair, knowing John would have a hell of a time getting into it.

He took a deep breath. “Well, we might as well get this started. Knowing him, he’s going to fight us on this one.”

Haggers smiled. “They all do at first. Then they realize they’re sick of being in bed all the time.”

Rodney grabbed the wheelchair and started wheeling it towards John’s room. Haggers opened the door for him and told him to take all the time he needed. John’s stuff was all packed and they had a van waiting to take them over to the rehab clinic, which was just a block over. Rodney should just holler and she would come in and help show John how to get from the bed into the chair.

Rodney wheeled the chair inside and plastered a grin on his face. “Good morning, sunshine. It’s moving day. Check out the hot wheels I’ve found for you.”

John glanced up from where he was leafing through a German magazine and froze.

Rodney put the brakes on and slumped into the chair, surprised that it was easier the second time. “See? It’s not toxic, idiot. Come on. Haggers said she’d show us how you can get your skinny ass into the chair from that bed. You haven’t been outside in weeks.”

John was still staring at the chair. “There might as well be handcuffs on the thing, Rodney.”

Rodney leaned forward and grabbed John’s chin and forced him to look at him. “Hey. Don’t think like that. The chair isn’t at fault here. The chair is something to help you get around. Think of it as a substitute for your legs.”

John stared at Rodney for a moment before he sighed and glanced at the door. “Lieutenant! Let’s get this show on the road!”

Haggers walked in and grinned at them both. “That’s a good attitude, John.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see how long it lasts.”

Rodney cuffed him over the back of the head while Haggers moved the chair around. She slowly explained and demonstrated how John would move himself over, grab the armrests—making sure the brakes were on!—and then swing his body around and into the chair. John stared at her. “I might be in good enough shape to sit up, but that’s a bit extreme.”

She grinned. “I know. Which is why you get to be lazy for the first little while.” She turned a beaming smile on Rodney, who stared back, slightly confused, until he got it.

“Me? You want me to cart his skinny ass from the bed to the chair? What if I drop him?”

She smiled. “Rodney, this is a skill you’ll have to learn too and probably teach to other people who are around John a lot.”

“What other people?”

John glared as Rodney pretended to look politely confused. Then Haggers gave him a pointed look and he realized it was time to get to work. He had learning and practicing to do.

Rolling up his sleeves, Rodney sighed dramatically and went over to John’s side. “Alright, princess. Let’s go.” He carefully followed Haggers instructions on gently picking John up and making sure John was clinging to his neck and then moving him to the chair and gently lowering him into it, making sure his feet were properly on the foot rests. He was surprised at how light John was. He had lost a lot of weight while in Somalia and in the hospital.

John was pale and looking close to freaking out so Rodney kept up a steady stream of chatter as he helped arrange a blanket around John’s legs and reminded him to zip up his jacket and put his bags on John’s lap. “You’re not doing any work here so the least you can do is carry your own stuff.”

Then Rodney started pushing the chair, only to realize the brakes were on and leaned over to unclick them. He was surprised to find it wasn’t as strange as it had been ten minutes ago. He could do this, he realized. He could start thinking of this as normal.

Whether John could, that was another question.

Rodney wheeled John out of the room and down the hallway, saying good-bye and thanking Dr. Clayton and Lieutenant Haggers along the way. The automatic doors opened for them and Rodney wheeled John out towards the waiting van.

He was still chattering on, with John not having said a word, only clutching the armrests with a death grip that had nothing to do with him believing he would fall out.

He was quiet while the attendants put him into the van, strapped him in and Rodney ran the wheelchair back into the hospital before getting in beside John.

The whole ride over, John didn’t say a word and Rodney didn’t force him to.

*          *          *

“Rodney?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you get me into bed?”

Rodney frowned down at him as he wheeled him into his new room. “You don’t want to explore the new territory?”

“No.”

Rodney waited a beat, wanting to see if John would admit that he only didn’t want to because he didn’t want to be seen in the chair, but knew that would take a while to get out of John — in words at least. His actions had spoken for themselves. The whole ride over and getting him out of the van and into a new chair and being introduced to the new staff and Rodney wheeling him into the clinic, John hadn’t said a word. He had ducked his head and avoided looking at anybody and only opened his mouth once they were alone in his room.

“Okay.” Rodney turned the chair and had to readjust it a few times until he got it right beside the bed. “It’s like god damn parallel parking. I avoid doing it for six years and now see where it gets me,” he muttered.

John didn’t smile, only reached up to grab Rodney’s neck as Rodney picked him up and put him into bed. Grabbing the shirt and boxers John liked to sleep in from the bag by the door, Rodney tossed the shirt at John.

He was about to toss his boxers at him too, but then he remembered that John couldn’t pull his pants off or put his boxers on by himself yet. Rodney wanted to freak out, but knew he had to focus. It was just another messed up reading that he had to make adjustments for.

So he reached over and pulled John’s pants and boxers off and pulled the new pair up while John wrestled himself into his shirt. Rodney kept up a steady stream of chatter after pulling John’s boxers up and then reached over to grab his legs to put them under the covers when suddenly, John slapped his hands away, hard.

Rodney abruptly yanked his hands back with a slight hiss, stopped talking and took a step back, staring at John. John wasn’t looking at him but was staring at a corner, looking like he was about to freak out. John forced himself to look up, his eyes anguished.

“Rodney, I’m sorry. I’m — ”

Rodney stepped back up to the bed and put a finger over John’s lips. “Hush. It’s okay. It’s okay. We’ll deal with it later. Just forget it for now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I said, forget it. There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

Then Rodney pulled the covers up over him and leaned over to kiss him on the lips before sinking into the chair. He was starting to find it surprisingly comfortable.

John was silent for a long moment, staring up at the ceiling and Rodney didn’t bug him. They still had a few hours before visiting hours were over.

“You don’t have to stay any longer.”

Rodney glanced up. “You sure?”

“Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” Rodney got up and leaned over and kissed John on the forehead. “You want your red boxers tomorrow or the blue ones?”

John turned his gaze from the ceiling to Rodney and frowned at him with confusion. “What?”

“Red boxers or blue ones? Biology didn’t send over your math ones. Damn biased quack.”

“What?” John was looking so confused that Rodney realized he might have missed something.

“You did say that I didn’t have to stay any longer, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you did say you were fine, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. And I’m just asking you what boxers you want when I come in tomorrow. We’re starting rehab so I figured wearing lucky boxers is essential. Damn, I should have insisted she send your math boxers.”

“Rodney, I meant you don’t have to stay here.”

“I get that, John. Some people aren’t as dense as lead.”

“No, I mean, you can go back to the States and get on with your life.”

Rodney burst out laughing. “Oh, okay. Yeah. I’ll get on a plane tomorrow and rebook my lab time and continue yelling at grad students and doing experiments and rewriting physics texts the day after tomorrow. You just give me a call when you’re ready. Shit, John, I know you’re Mr. Independent, but can we please not deal with that particular issue until at least half of the rehab is done?”

He gradually stopped laughing when he realized John was looking serious. Sad and trying to hide it, but dead serious.

“Why aren’t you laughing about this?”

“Because I’m serious, Rodney. This isn’t fair to you. This isn’t what you signed up for.”

Rodney held up a hand and pretended to look perplexed. “Haven’t we had this idiotic conversation before? Hmm. Yeah, I seem to remember us talking about this a while ago. You know what’s funny? I also seem to remember saying that we were never talking about this ludicrous garbage again.”

“That was different, Rodney. This is _really_ not what you signed up for.”

Rodney’s earlier humor disappeared and anger flooded him. “Oh, I’m sorry, and you did?”

“Rodney — ”

“No. Answer the question. Was there something on that piece of paper that said, check here if you want to be a paraplegic for the rest of your life?”

John looked momentarily shocked at the word ‘paraplegic’ and Rodney realized that he hadn’t used the word in John’s presence yet, but then decided it was high time to start using it. Neither of them were any good at dancing around on egg shells.

“No, you didn’t. But it happened. So we deal with it. I wasn’t thrilled about having to sit around and wait and worry about you for months either, was I? I adapted and so did you. We can do the same thing here.”

“Rodney, asking you to wait a few months while I’m at war is different from asking you to take care of a cripple for the rest of your life!”

“I won’t be babysitting a fucking cripple, John! I’ll be with you. Like always.”

“It’s not the same thing! This isn’t what you wanted!”

Rodney wasn’t sure when they had started yelling at each other, but figured now was as good of a time as any to introduce the rehab staff and patients to their usual, loving conversations. Rodney had a feeling they would be having quite a few of these over the next few weeks.

He loved John, he really did, but sometimes, the man’s stubborn idiocy and lack of common sense when it came to relationships were too much for him. Sometimes, John really needed to have things spelt out slowly and carefully as if they were in kindergarten.

“What I want is to be with you and love you and have you love me. That’s it. Whether you’re walking or not, whether you’re missing all your limbs and half your face or not, whether we have to hide our relationship for the rest of our lives or not, it doesn’t matter. I want to be with you, John, and if that meant making the military part of my life, and now, making this chair a part of my life, then so be it.”

John stared at him for a long moment. “I want you to know that if you ever want out — _ever_ — then all you have to do it say so. Because if you don’t, Rodney, if you stay out of pity or — or obligation, that would kill me.”

Rodney grabbed John’s hand and kissed it. “I promise, if I ever want out, I will say so. Loudly. But I can also promise that that won’t happen. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, military or not, chair or not. And I will do whatever I have to to keep us together, alright?”

John nodded, swallowing hard and blinking.

“But you have to promise me something too. I’m going to fight like hell for us, but you have to swear to me that you’ll do the same.”

He nodded, grabbing Rodney’s hand. “Okay.” He fiercely kissed the hand he held. “Okay.”

“We can do this.”

“We can do this.”

Rodney smiled and glanced over at the door. Kicking his shoes off, he climbed over John and lay down on top of the covers beside him. “Come here.”

John rolled into his arms and buried his face in Rodney’s neck. Rodney gently rubbed small circles into the back of John’s neck with one hand and kept the other one tightly wrapped around his waist. John buried his hands in Rodney’s t-shirt.

“They’ll kick me out pretty soon.”

“They’ll have to separate your shirt from my hand first, and not even a grenade can do that.”

“Now that’s some lovely imagery I don’t want to think about.”

John chuckled briefly and sighed into Rodney’s neck.

Rodney was almost asleep when he heard John whisper ‘I love you too’. He smiled and pretended to be asleep but squeezed his arms around John tighter, feeling like he was slowly starting to understand how to save this experiment.


	5. Losing the Sky

“One more set, please, John.”

Rodney watched John take a deep breath, wipe the sweat off his forehead and grab the bars he was sitting under and grunt his way through five more pull ups.

“If I broke my back would I be expected to do hours of pull ups too? Because seriously, I have never done a pull up in my life and without my legs doing three quarters of the work, I’d hang there like a limp noodle.”

The physical therapist laughed but didn’t move her eyes from where John was lowering himself back into his chair and collapsing, sweat soaking through his shirt. She only glanced over when John was safely settled.

“We tailor everybody’s therapy to their own physical fitness standards, Rodney.”

John licked his lips and reached down for the water bottle stashed in the holder on the side of his chair and squirted some water into his mouth. “What about people who have no physical fitness standards to start with?”

“Hey! I resent that.”

John gave him a weak grin. Rodney couldn’t help but smile back. It was rare to see John smiling these days, never mind cracking jokes and laughing.

Out of all of their therapy, John seemed to enjoy the physically draining parts the most. The doctors and therapists all said that it wasn’t uncommon. John liked using the parts of his body that still worked and liked seeing that those parts could still do what they were supposed to.

It was the other stuff that was more difficult. Every time John bumped into a wall, bed or person with his chair, he’d grit his teeth and have to spend a few minutes wheeling back and forth until he was going in the direction he wanted to again. Rodney knew it was the slowness of the process, the clumsiness that bothered John more than actually bumping into things.

Rodney was never sure how far to push things. He never helped John before letting John try it himself, having learned that after being shoved, smacked and cursed at during moments of anger.

But sometimes Rodney would push things too far. One morning he’d walked beside John down the hallway and John had run into a small ornamental side table and had to spend a few minutes getting straightened out.

Rodney had continued down the hallway, knowing better than to grab John’s chair and re-orient him himself. He had yelled over his shoulder for John to hurry up or he’d grow old soon. John had not responded and Rodney slowed his pace, realizing it was taking John longer than usual to catch up. Then Rodney pushed things too far and yelled back that John was being a slow poke. John had snapped back at him that Rodney should shut the fuck up since he had two perfectly good legs and could obviously walk down a damn hallway faster.

Rodney had frozen, completely stunned for a moment until he had come back and knelt down in front of John’s chair. He pulled John into his arms and murmured that he was sorry. John had remained tense and angry for a few more minutes before whispering that it was okay. Then Rodney picked up the table, put it in John’s lap and quickly wheeled them to the front doors and they threw the small table into the bushes, laughing crazily and quickly hurrying back in before they were caught.

After the first few days of letting Rodney pick him up and carry him from his bed to his chair and back, John started asserting his independence in all physical activities with a ferocity that scared Rodney more than reassured him.

One memorable morning, John had fallen out of bed, missed his chair seven times, and cut his chin open before he had finally fought his way into his chair, gasping for breath, eyes sparking with anger at himself and the world and refused to let the nurses near him to clean up the cut. Rodney had gone to sit in one of the visitor chairs by the door for the entire episode, ignoring John’s fumbling, grunting attempts to get himself into his chair until he had finally done it. Then he had shooed the nurses out, grabbed John’s chin and cleaned him up, smacking his hands away when John tried to stop him.

He knew John was desperately trying to find his own strengths again and relearn his boundaries but Rodney did put a foot down and stop some of the more spectacular hissy fits.

But even those episodes weren’t the most painful. The morning one of the nurses came in holding an enormous bundle of adult diapers, Rodney knew they were in trouble. Within five minutes, John had thrown a lamp at her and used language that Rodney decided to blame on army influences. Rodney was about to launch into a speech on the need to keep jarheads separate from the rest of the military grunts, when he realized that the nurse looked a bit scared and had quickly ushered her out.

She had calmly explained to Rodney that diapers were the easiest way for John to live. Rodney had demanded a more detailed explanation.

An hour later, armed with textbooks, pamphlets and boxes of equipment, Rodney went back into John’s room and sat down in his wheelchair. While John tried to fix the lamp he had broken, Rodney quietly explained that John didn’t only wear a catheter whenever he was in bed because of a hospital regulation.

His bowel and bladder control were shot. His digestive system and kidneys still did what they had to do—thankfully—but the signal that was sent to his brain to tell John that it was time to empty either his bladder or bowels couldn’t reach his brain anymore and they would be emptied involuntarily whenever his muscles got too worn out to hold on any longer. If John wanted to relieve himself on his own terms, another problem was that his brain could no longer tell those muscles to do their business.

The easiest solution was diapers. They were comfortable, not too expensive and—Rodney rambled through the list, ignoring the glare John was shooting his way—and just had to be changed a few times a day.

“I’m not wearing fucking diapers, McKay.”

“John, the nurse was right. It’s the easiest—”

“What part of ‘I’m not wearing fucking diapers’ did you not understand?”

Rodney sighed. “Fine. I told her you wouldn’t go for it. But seriously, after I explain the alternatives, you might want to go with diapers because of the convenience. Seriously.”

“I’m not wearing diapers.”

Pinching the bridge of his nose and knowing that he had lost this battle before it had even started, Rodney shoved the pamphlets, boxes and textbooks at him. “Fine. Then that’s your alternative.”

John stared at the stuff in his lap. “What’s this?”

“Intermittent catheterization.”

“And you told me not to use foul language. I had no idea physicists had worse language than General Renton.”

“John, I’m serious. If you don’t want diapers, then this is your only other easy option. You have to learn how to put in a catheter yourself and get rid of urine like that.”

“I’m not living the rest of my life with a plastic tube jammed up my—”

“Not all day, you idiot! You have to regulate how much you drink and when you drink and you’ll develop a schedule. So even when you can’t feel your bladder getting full, you’ll know when it’s actually full and then you’ll hook yourself up and go.”

“I really don’t think it’s that easy.”

“No kidding. And you haven’t even seen the pictures in that pamphlet yet. We’re going to have to blow up a copy and put it in the bathroom.”

“We’re really not doing that.”

“Whatever. The nurse said we have to practice with supervision first and learn how to do it properly before they’ll let us do it on our own.”

“If I can’t feel anything down there then what does it matter if I poke myself the wrong way?”

Rodney leaned over and pulled out a large textbook from the pile and opened it to the relevant page.

John made a face as soon as he saw the graphic pictures. “What the hell is that?”

“That is a result of a urinary tract infection. Apparently, they’re very easy to get and very dangerous because you won’t feel any of the painful symptoms.”

“You mean the funky urine color won’t tip me off?”

“How much time do you spend staring at your own piss?”

“Fine. Okay. Supervision it is. But you’re going to learn too, right?”

“So in addition to going to the bathroom on my own, I have to do half the work for you too?” Rodney tried his best to sound offended.

“Hey, equality was never part of the agreement.”

Rodney smacked John over the head with a pamphlet and then let them drop in his lap. Rodney knew that John wasn’t whining because he was lazy—okay, partially not anyway—but because he was scared to do these new things on his own with a body that only worked half right.

“I’m almost scared to ask but what do we do about things coming out the other way?”

“Oh, you’ll love this. It’s actually kind of kinky in a really weird way.”

“Do I even want to know?”

“We can just go with the diapers—”

“Lay on the kinkiness.”

“So there’s this thing called a suppository.”

“Is this some bondage thing?”

“Shut up, Sheppard. This is serious.”

“Yup. Serious shit, huh?” John waggled his eyebrows at him.

Rodney couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing and smacked John over the head again. He was glad that John was in such a good mood now. He knew that in a few hours when it would be time to try all this for the first time, that good mood would go up in a puff of smoke.

“Anyway. So it’s this bullet like thing that works like a laxative. Except you don’t swallow it.”

John frowned. “So how does it…”

Rodney waited for John to put two and two together. Finally, John’s eyebrows shot up.

“Really?”

“Yup.”

“I’m not that flexible.”

Rodney gave him a look. “Yes, you are.”

John thought about if for a moment. “Right, yeah. I am.” He tilted his head and a sly smile crept over his face. “Hey, you think I can mention that when the nurse comes back?”

“Do I think you should mention to your female nurse that you’ve spent a lot of time with your fingers up your ass and therefore will be very good at shoving little pills up there? Let’s think about that one. It’s a tough question.”

“She might think it’s hot.”

“Can we please not test that theory?”

John sighed heavily. “Fine. Ruin my fun. So, I shove a little pill thing up my ass and then what?”

“Then you go sit in the bathroom and wait.”

“That’s it?”

“Yup.”

“How do I know when to use this pill thing?”

“The same way you’ll know when you have to use the catheter. You’ll have to eat certain food at certain times and your body will get used to the routine.”

“What certain food?”

“Use your head, Sheppard. Lots of fibers take forever to digest. Mushy stuff takes shorter time. You have to drink something crazy like 10 glasses of water a day to keep your urinary tract flushed clean and help things move along, and by the way, have I mentioned that drinking booze is pretty much a no-no?”

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope. Doc’s orders. No hard liquor.”

“But beer’s okay?”

“In moderation. And not your version of moderation.”

“Damn it.” John sighed and closed his eyes for a brief moment before he opened them again. “What other exciting stuff do I get to look forward to?”

Picking up another pamphlet, Rodney leaned back in the wheelchair and propped his feet up on John’s bed.

“Pneumonia. Urinary tract infections—”

“Covered that already.”

“Well, it’s kind of a biggie. The nurse said that you can get it from using dirty equipment, from you being dirty or from urine brewing bacteria if you don’t get it out in time and force it to creep back up your ureters.” Rodney couldn’t remember ever having to say the words ‘urine’, ‘ureters’ and ‘urinary tract infections’ so much before in his life. Or ever, really.

“Oh, okay. Next.”

“Are you even remembering any of this?”

“Not only do I have you, but I have all of this in writing strewn across my lap, right? So, the info’s going into two heads and we have the original sources. We’re good.”

“Fine. Your muscles are going to be going on random holidays and having spastic moments now and then. Some days you won’t be able to get yourself out of bed, other days, you’ll be doing pull-ups for hours. And you have to exercise your leg muscles too, otherwise they’ll cramp up and start atrophying.”

“I don’t use the damn things anymore so who cares?”

“You will when you get a blood clot in them and that blood clot moves up into your lungs or heart or somewhere else. Not to mention that those legs kept you alive for more than twenty years and deserve some attention even if they retired early.”

“What else?”

“Pressure sores.”

“What?”

“Did it never seem odd to you that the nurses come in a few times a night to prod you and turn you over?”

“I thought they were being sadistic or paranoid that I’d die in my sleep or something.”

“They have monitors for that, genius. Anyway, usually, if you put too much pressure on a certain body part by staying in the same position for too long, the pain will let you know to move but in this case,—”

“In this case that message is falling on a deaf brain.”

“That is so wrong that I can’t even begin to—”

“You’re supposed to say that that was brilliant and witty.”

“That was dumb and so not funny that I will pretend we never got on this idiotic tangent. What was I saying?”

“How I can get pressure sores.”

“Right. So we’ll have to put pillows on your chair and during the night, we have to set a little alarm and roll you over every so often.”

“Pressure sores can get infected right?”

“Right. And that would bring on another nightmare because your immune system isn’t what it was before. So, the name of the game is to stay as clean and healthy as possible.”

John nodded and fiddled with the edge of one of the pamphlets while Rodney tried to tilt the chair back without falling over. He started rolling away before he remembered to put the brakes on.

He carefully leaned backwards. “So, we’re absolutely sure we’re not going for diapers?”

John glared and smacked him with a handful of papers. Rodney jerked back and promptly made the wheelchair fall over with a thud.

Neither of them were sure whether it was Rodney’s cursing or John’s laughing that brought half the staff running to their room.

*          *          *

Just as Rodney had predicted, the theory was easier in discussion than in practice. John was used to nurses bugging him with the catheter, but having to try to put it in on his own with a nurse watching and patiently trying to coach him drove him nuts. Within two minutes, John had thrown the plastic tubing at her and told her to get the hell out.

Rodney caught the tubing before it hit the floor—Bacteria! Bacteria!—and asked the nurse to wait outside. Then he threw the tubing back at John and yelled at him to stop being childish and that if he didn’t want to wear diapers, he would have to learn how to do this.

John had screamed back at him that he’d rather piss himself than to have a nurse teach him how to hold his own dick.

Rodney had opened his mouth to yell back but then pinched the bridge of his nose, grabbed the tubing back and went out, slamming the door behind him. He went and found the nurse, dragged her into an empty room, pulled his pants down and handed her the tubing. “You’ve got ten minutes to teach me how to do this. Any longer and he’ll have found a way to rappel out of the window and crawl into a cab.”

Ten minutes later, Rodney limped back into John’s room, in such pain that he could hardly walk and handed John new tubing, gasping that if John voiced a syllable of complaint for the rest of the day, he would wrap the tubing around his throat and strangle him.

After patiently teaching John how to insert the catheter—and both of them actually being amazed that it worked and being freaked out at the fact that so much urine had been sitting in John’s bladder without him feeling a thing—and how to clean the equipment and store it, Rodney lay down on John’s bed, still wincing at the tenderness in his own lower regions.

John lay his head on Rodney’s chest and let his hand wander down until he was fingering Rodney’s waistband.

“I could make the soreness go away.”

“You really think I want anybody touching anything down there right now? The thought of it makes me want to cry.”

“That makes me feel special.”

Rodney rolled his eyes. “Oh, shut up.”

John snorted with laughter and slipped his hand under Rodney’s shirt and gently stroked his tummy.

“Quit fondling my fat.”

“There’s no fat there. Only Rodney perfection.”

They stayed quiet for a full minute while Rodney bit his cheeks, before he couldn’t help himself and burst out laughing. “You are such a dork, John Sheppard.”

“Yeah, well, you love me anyway.”

They were quiet for a long time until John sighed quietly. “I couldn’t do this without you, you know that, right? I’d have given up weeks ago. Slit the arteries in my legs and let myself bleed out without feeling a thing.”

“John! Quit that!”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I! Don’t ever, _ever_ , say stuff like that. It scares the shit out of me.”

“Life without you scares the shit out of me.”

Rodney wrapped his arms around John and kissed him on the forehead. “I told you, we’re in this for the long haul.”

*          *          *

“So you want ten socks?”

“Make it twelve. Just in case.”

“Okay, whatever. I’ll send you thirteen. For luck, you know.”

“Bite me, biology.”

Rodney ignored the laughter coming through the phone. He listened to her going through the list of clothes and things he wanted her to send over next week, only half paying attention and staring at the ugly, beige colored walls. Some commotion by the front door caught his attention and he spied some uniformed officers walking in. The thing that caught his attention was that they were wearing dress uniforms.

The center housed a large proportion of military patients since it was so close to the American military hospital, but most of the soldiers who came to see their friends, comrades or family would wear their civies or BDUs. Whenever someone with a dress uniform with lots of stuff pinned to their blue or green jackets came in, somebody got some very good or very bad news.

He watched as the uniform slowly walked down the corridor and stopped at John’s door. Rodney immediately hung up the phone—in the middle of biology starting a rant about having to share a lab with a slob who never cleaned the pipets or turned Bunsen burners off. He hurried to John’s room and promptly had the door shut in his face. He reached for the doorknob and opened it.

He immediately saw that John was sitting up in bed, with that straight faced, military blankness—Rodney called it the zombie look—and some old brass was standing beside him with another guy in a uniform standing by the foot of John’s bed. The two of them stiffly turned towards the door. A nurse had seen Rodney from down the hall and was running towards him, obviously intent on stopping him.

“We’ll have to ask you to wait outside.”

Rodney raised an eyebrow. “Who are you?”

John’s gaze slid over to him and Rodney saw a wince cross his face. “Rodney — !”

“No. This is your room and if they can barge in here like they own the place then I have every right to ask who they are.”

The younger one standing by end of John’s bed looked appalled by Rodney’s rudeness and John looked like he would rather be practicing catheterization than be here right now.

The older one looked Rodney over from head to toe before turning to John.

“Who is this?”

“My friend, Rodney McKay, sir.”

“Do you want him to stay?”

“Yes, sir.”

Rodney had never heard John sound so polite and calm and was about to remark on it when he realized that he might be forced to leave. So instead, he went and stood beside John’s bed.

He only half paid attention when the two uniforms introduced themselves and only got back into the conversation when he heard the words “discharge papers” being uttered.

John had gone stiff and silent beside him, the zombie look being his excuse for staring at the far wall, no expression on his face.

Rodney felt his heart ache as he listened to the older uniform quietly explaining that John had served his country to the best of his abilities and that his country would always remember the sacrifices he had made and be proud of his accomplishments. Then he informed John of his disability pay and that the military was paying for all of his hospital stay and rehab time and would fly him back to the States for free when he was ready.

Rodney snorted at that.

“He’s paralyzed for life and you give him a free ride home? That’s great. Thanks. It really made it all worth it.”

John didn’t say anything. He was still staring at the wall, blank faced and unmoving. The two uniforms didn’t react either, instead, the older one rambled on and on before giving John a stack of papers to sign.

John wordlessly signed the papers and got to keep his very own copy of the paper stating that he was officially discharged from the US military.

“Oh, goody. We get a copy. John, make sure you frame it when we get back home.”

Shuffling their papers, the two uniforms quietly excused themselves, shutting the door behind them.

Rodney was silent for a moment, watching John staring at the exact same spot on the wall, not having moved a muscle.

Slowly, he blinked. “I never get to fly again, Rodney.”

“John — ” Rodney whispered, feeling his insides aching for John.

“I never get to fly again. I never get to be a soldier again. I’m going to be stuck on the ground, in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, Rodney.”

With a sickening lurch, Rodney realized that this was the first time that that fact had actually sunk in for John.

Wordlessly, he stepped up to the bed and turned John’s chin until he was looking at him.

“We’ll get through this, remember? We can do this. We’ll make this work, John. Somehow. I swear to you. We’ll make something of life. I don’t know what, but we’ll make something special of it.”

John reached up to his neck and his hand shook as he clutched the chain of his dog tags, the last remainders of the life he had to give up forever.

The tears that Rodney had been trying to hold back spilled over and he pulled John into his arms, desperately wishing that there was a way to take his healthy spinal cord and give it to John and implant the damaged one into Rodney.

“If I could give you my legs, I would,” Rodney whispered. He knew that John needed them more than he did.

John clutched Rodney and buried his face in his shoulder, his shoulders starting to shake as he started to sob.

Rodney lifted his head to kiss John’s temple and tangle his hand into John’s short hair.

“We can do this, John. We made a promise, remember? We’ll make something of life. Something amazing. You hear me?” he choked out between sobs.

He wasn’t sure John had heard him so he turned his head and whispered it over and over again into John’s ear, holding him and whispering. He had no idea how he was going to go about fulfilling that promise, but the first step was giving John the hope that it was possible.

John might have lost the skies forever, but Rodney was determined to make his life on the ground worth something.


	6. Coming Home

“What do you mean there’s nothing more we can do?” Rodney spat, his grip on the phone growing tighter in anger.

“I talked to them three times, McKay, and you yelled at them half a dozen times. There’s nothing they can do. There are no other residences vacant on campus.”

“What are we supposed to do?!”

“McKay, calm down—”

“Calm down? We live on the third floor, you idiot! In a building without an elevator! How the hell is John supposed to get up there? Jump from the sidewalk?”

“Look, I don’t know what you expect.”

“What I expect is that finals just ended and everybody is clearing out for the summer.”

“Yeah, from the undergrad residences, genius. Most of the grad students and the profs are staying in their apartments! You know that.”

Rodney was silent for a long moment, letting his head fall back against the wall.

He couldn’t believe that he had forgotten about this for so long.

He had completely forgotten about flying back to the States. He had been so busy helping John learn how to do basic things again that he had forgotten about the fact that they lived on the third floor of a building without an elevator. He had called biology—whose name he had finally learned was Kelly Taylor—and had begged her to go and ask housing if there was somewhere else they could move to.

There wasn’t. And John was going to be released in a week.

“Shit.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Thank you, that really helps.”

“When are you coming home?”

“A week!” he snapped. “We’ve been over this a million times.”

“Quit snapping at me, moron! It’s your own fault you didn’t think of this sooner.” She let out a loud sigh. “Listen, I just got an idea. Let me run downstairs and check something. Call me back in fifteen minutes.”

There was a click and Rodney was sitting with a silent phone pressed against his ear. He lowered the receiver and closed his eyes. He spent a few useful minutes slamming his head against the wall.

“That’s really going to be helpful.”

Rodney’s eyes snapped open and he saw John wheeling himself out of the gym and coming towards him, his hair plastered to his forehead and the rest of him sticky and shiny with sweat.

“How was physio?”

“Grueling and awesome.”

“Of course.”

John rolled himself closer and put the brakes on and grabbed his water bottle and drank some water while Rodney hung the phone back on the hook.

“Was that Kelly?”

“Yeah.”

“Any luck?”

“We’re supposed to call her back in fifteen minutes. She seems to have had an idea.”

“Should we be scared?”

“She’s a biology student. Of course we should be scared.”

John grinned and used the towel on his lap to wipe his mouth off. They sat there for a few more minutes until it was time to call Kelly back.

“Tell me you have something,” Were the first words out of Rodney’s mouth before Kelly had even said a word.

“You two owe me big time.”

Rodney sat up with a jerk and his eyes widened as he grabbed John’s hand, squeezing it hard enough to grind the bones.

“Anything.”

“I’m going to want that in writing as soon as you’re off the plane, you hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah. What did you do?”

“There’s this psych guy—”

“We’re not doing any dealings with any arties.”

“McKay, shut up. It’s either this or Sheppard gets to start learning how to levitate.”

“Fine. Go.”

“I’ve been hearing for weeks that he hates the fact that his place doesn’t have a view and he wants to move up to a higher level in the building.”

“What does this have to do with us?”

“He lives in our building, idiot.”

“And he lives on the first floor?”

“Right next to the main doors. You could spit at the main door from the bathroom and nail it.”

“Taylor, you are our hero!”

“I know. Remember, you both owe me huge. Especially because I told him if he wanted your apartment, he’d have to recruit his own little army to help move his crap up here and move your stuff down there within the next week.”

Rodney dropped the phone and grabbed a surprised John around the neck, a huge smile plastered on his face.

“We got a place, John! We can go home!”

*          *          *

Rodney jumped out of the cab and sprinted into the airport. He spent a few minutes, hunting around for the airport’s wheelchairs. He finally stomped up to the information desk, pushed past thirteen people waiting in line and demanded to know why there weren’t any clear signs stating where the wheelchairs were at.

The woman had blinked at him and mutely pointed at a small alcove close to the doors.

“Oh, I see. We’re all supposed to go poking around in dark, dingy corners, right?”

Rodney spun away and went to grab one of the wheelchairs and wheel it out the front door. While John hoisted himself from the cab into the chair, Rodney jerked their suitcases out of the trunk and dropped them on John’s lap.

After he paid the cab driver and started pushing John towards the doors, he kept up a steady stream of complaints over the lack of proper signage and idiot airport staff.

When they were five meters from the front doors, Rodney felt the wheelchair suddenly screeching to a halt.

He nearly fell over. “What the hell? Can’t they keep these things properly maintained?”

Before he could launch into another rant, he saw that John had put the brakes on and had grabbed the wheel spokes to stop the chair.

“John, what are you doing? We have to go check in.”

“Rodney, I can’t do this.”

“Did you not notice me helping push you? I realize you’re carrying all my junk, that’s why I’m helping push, moron.”

“That’s not — I can’t do this.”

“Can’t do what?”

He heard John mutter something and he leaned closer to him. “What?”

John shook his head fiercely, ducking his head and refused to repeat himself.

Rodney checked to makes sure the brakes were on properly and then stepped around the chair and knelt down before John.

“What’s wrong? We’re going home. You’ve been wanting this for weeks.”

John shook his head again and brought his hands up to hide his face.

Rodney frowned. “John, talk to me.”

When John still didn’t answer, Rodney leaned against John’s legs and reached up to pull his hands away from his face. John resisted a bit but Rodney applied a bit more pressure.

He searched his blank face, desperately wanting to understand why John was suddenly having a little freak-out.

Rodney squeezed John’s hands and put them in his lap. “Tell me.”

“I don’t want them to see me.”

“Who?”

“Them. All of them.”

Rodney frowned around, wondering if there were some soldiers or people they knew around, but only saw normal people, hurrying in and out of the airport.

“People?”

John nodded.

“Why don’t you want them to see you? I’ve told you a million times, you’re the hottest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, Sheppard. Let them look. I like seeing the jealousy.”

“I don’t want them to see me in the chair.”

Rodney finally understood. “John, it doesn’t matter.”

“They stare, Rodney. Look at them.”

Rodney took a minute to glance around and saw that people _were_ staring at them, even if they were making an effort not to or pretend that they weren’t. Little kids openly stared, some even pointed with wide eyes and nearly walked into their parents as they tried to stare at them while walking away. Rodney glared at them.

“John, it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m not a freak, Rodney. They’re staring at me like I’m a freak.”

“Of course you’re not a freak, John! You’re in a wheelchair because you broke your back. You’re a normal guy who broke his back.”

“I don’t want them to stare.”

“Act like it doesn’t bother you and they’ll stop.”

“I don’t want them to stare at all, Rodney. I don’t stare at them.”

“I know, John, but human beings are curious, nasty little creatures. They’ll stare at anything that interests them, anything that’s different. You do it, I do it. We all do it. You have to get used to it and learn to ignore them. If you act like a normal guy in a chair, then that’s what they’ll see. Not a freak. Just a normal guy.”

When John didn’t respond, Rodney reached up and lifted his face and leaned in until their foreheads touched.

“Okay?”

John took a deep, shuddering breath. “No. But I’ll try.”

Rodney gently kissed him on the lips and smiled. “Good. That’s all I need. Come on, we have a plane to catch.”

Standing up again, Rodney undid the brakes and pushed John through the doors. As they walked through the carpeted foyer, Rodney started noticing just how many people were staring at him. Well, not him, but at John.

Rodney had long ago stopped noticing people’s reactions to him since it never mattered to him. But he knew that John was much more sensitive about these things, even if he didn’t show it. Especially now.

So he kept up a steady stream of chatter, glaring at the few obnoxious kids who stared too long and pointed with grubby fingers and ignoring the tenseness in John’s shoulders and how he kept his eyes glued to his feet.

*          *          *

Yawning, Rodney dragged himself out of the cab, accidentally thanking the cab driver in German and handing him a wad of German bills until he realized his mistake and took the American currency John pressed into his hand.

He stumbled onto the sidewalk and nearly did a face plant. He wearily turned around to the trunk and got their things out when he remembered.

“Oh, shit!”

“What?” John called from where he was pulling himself over to the open door.

“It’s eleven at night.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Where are we going to find a wheelchair on a dark university campus at eleven at night?”

John gaped at him for a moment before he let out a snort of laughter and leaned back.

“Shit.”

“What a crappy boy scout you are, Rodney McKay,” came a snarky voice from the darkness.

Rodney spun around to see Kelly Taylor walking towards him. She stopped in front of him and put her hands on her hips. Then she leaned around him.

“Hey, John.”

“Hey, Kelly.”

“Need a chair?”

“It would be good, yeah. Rodney might drop me.”

Kelly laughed and waved at someone further down the sidewalk.

Suddenly, Jeannie appeared, pushing a wheelchair. There appeared to be something small sitting on the chair and when they got closer, Rodney realized it was Cat.

Rodney let out a laugh, feeling such relief that he nearly fainted. He was honestly not sure which of the three he was happiest to see.

“Jeannie?!” he heard John call from the cab.

Jeannie let out a laugh and let go of the wheelchair long enough to jump on Rodney and give him a huge hug. Rodney snapped out of his surprise and hugged her back tightly.

Kelly had grabbed the chair and moved it over to the cab for John.

“Courtesy of campus security.”

“Security? Why would security have a chair lying around?”

She shrugged. “Don’t ask. Just appreciate it.”

John swung himself into it and Kelly raised her eyebrows. “Nice move.”

“Thanks. Been practicing.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. There’s someone here who’s missed you.”

John looked up from slamming the cab door and waving to the driver. Kelly was holding Cat out to him. John gently picked up the small cat and let her smell his hands while he settled her on his lap.

“Hey, girl. I’ve missed you. I know we don’t really know each other but it’s good to see you.”

Moments later, Cat was torn from his lap as Rodney picked her up and nearly strangled her in a bear hug while Jeannie hurried over to John and hugged him.

“Hey. I’m so glad you’re home, you have no idea.”

John smiled and hugged her back. “It’s good to be home. We’ve missed you. What are you doing here?”

Jeannie leaned back and grinned. “Well, Kelly here called me and told me she only had a week to get a filthy apartment cleaned up, put all your stuff in it and get it ready for you guys to come home to, so she called me and I came down to help out a bit.”

“The move’s done?”

“Yup. Everything’s ready. Come see.”

John grabbed one of the suitcases and was about to put it into his lap when Kelly grabbed it and Jeannie grabbed the other. Rodney was already half way to the front door, cradling Cat and not even noticing the fact that everybody else was lugging his luggage.

John wheeled himself along, gritting his teeth at how his arms burned. Sidewalk was a lot harder to wheel over than the smooth tiles in the rehab center and he’d been up for more than twenty hours. He licked his dry lips, knowing he was badly dehydrated, but he hadn’t dared to drink anything for hours. Using the catheter in a wide open bathroom with Rodney for help was one thing, doing it in an airplane cubicle was entirely different.

He finally reached the front door, sweating and trying to gasp for breath quietly.

Rodney was waiting for them at the front door and unlocked it and swung it open.

Letting Jeannie and Kelly struggle past him with their suitcases, he dropped Cat in John’s lap. “Here, you hold her. You’re about to pass out.”

He stepped behind the chair and pushed John through the door and stopped in front of the small door which Kelly was unlocking.

With a grin, she threw it open and flipped the light switch on the wall. “Welcome home.”

Rodney wheeled John in and they both froze in the doorway, staring around in amazement.

Everything in the apartment was exactly the same as Rodney had left their apartment upstairs weeks ago when he’d left for Germany. Their TV was in the same place, the couch faced the same way, and even their diplomas were hung on the wall.

Rodney hurried into the bathroom. “Oh, my God, John! Everything’s set up exactly the same way as upstairs. Your new toothbrush is even in here!”

John grinned as he stared around. He wheeled himself into the kitchen and opened one of the lower cupboards. He laughed out loud when he saw the box of Lucky Charms and the jar of peanut butter inside.

“You’re both crazy, you know that?” He laughed, glancing over to where Kelly and Jeannie had settled on the couch, watching the two of them looking over their home.

“So we’ve been told. But we both have legitimate excuses. I’m in biology and she’s a McKay.”

Jeannie laughed as Rodney yelled an indignant “Hey!” from the bedroom.

John wheeled himself out of the kitchen and came over to the couch while Rodney showed Cat how their clothes had been put into the drawers, the right half filled with Rodney’s clothes and the left with John’s, just as he had always had them.

John laughed. “I don’t think the cat cares about how our clothes are organized.”

“You be quiet. Cat and I spend a lot of time organizing when you’re not home. She appreciates this as much as we do.”

John rolled his eyes at him and put his brakes on.

“How do you like it?” Jeannie asked

“There aren’t even words. Thank you. You have no idea what this means to us.”

Jeannie smiled sadly and came and crouched down before him. She reached up and gently stroked his cheek.

“It was the least I could do. You’re family, John, you know that. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through in the past few weeks but I wanted to do what I could to make life a bit easier. And I’ll keep doing it. Anything you guys need, ever, you call me and I’ll do it. I swear.”

John nodded, feeling his throat getting tight. He gave her a tight hug, whispering a thank you into her hair.

She smiled and released him, going off to hug her brother, who was busy staring out of their bedroom window with Cat and sighing about how these drapes were dirtier than theirs had been upstairs.

John mused over the fact that Rodney had really turned into a neat freak.

For years, it had been John who was constantly picking up after Rodney and berating him for leaving dirty dishes on the counter and dirty towels on the bathroom floor.

When he had mentioned it to him in the hospital after he had watched Rodney carefully folding his clothes and putting them into a bag, Rodney had glanced up and shrugged, saying that he had learned that cleaning killed time so he’d done a lot of it over the past few months.

John wheeled himself over to Kelly.

She waggled her eyebrows at him. “So. You scored a nice place, huh? Kinda resembles the original.”

“I like the original just fine.”

“I’ve always said there’s something wrong with you, Sheppard. This is the reason.”

“We’re not just talking about the apartment, are we?”

She grinned. “You’ve had time to trade in both McKay and your apartment and you chose to stay with the originals in both cases. You’re crazy. Hot, but crazy.”

“Will you forgive me if I share my disability pay with you?”

She laughed. “You put up with McKay nearly twenty-four hours a day. You need that money for booze.”

John chuckled and then grew serious again. “Thank you, Kelly. I mean it. You’ve been such a lifeline for both Rodney and me since this happened. You sent us stuff, you yelled at people for us, you took care of Cat and you even entered dealings with a psych student.”

“Says the English major. You’re burning yourself there, you know.”

“Only half of me.”

She laughed and then shrugged. “I told you, you both owe me big.”

“We really do. Anything, anytime, I mean it. You name it, you’ve got it.”

“I still want that in writing.”

“I’ll tattoo it on my forehead tomorrow.”

She grinned. “Deal.”

She leaned over and hugged him tightly. “Welcome home.”

“Thank you.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you came back. McKay would have been completely unmanageable if you hadn’t.”

John laughed as he released her. He spent a moment staring around their new apartment.

For the first time since he had gotten into that German airport, he felt the tenseness seep out of him.

He was home. Rodney was home. And they would be okay.

As his eyes trailed around the familiar furniture, he suddenly saw a framed picture of him and Rodney at a casino in Vegas sitting on the television.

For a second, his heart caught in his throat and he was about to hurry forward, snatch it up and hide it away. If any military personnel came by and saw it—!

And then he remembered.

He froze. He wasn’t in the military anymore. He wasn’t a soldier.

Those rules didn’t apply to him anymore.

He slowly sank back in his chair, oblivious to Kelly having gotten up to speak to Jeannie and Rodney in the bedroom.

He could be with Rodney now. All day, any day. He could hold his hand in public. Hell, he could kiss him in public. He could keep their pictures up all year round and he could even carry a picture of the two of them in his wallet like he’d always wanted to do.

He didn’t have to have his own apartment anymore. He didn’t have to keep two sets of clothes in two apartments. He didn’t have to have two toothbrushes anymore. He didn’t have to sneak down a dark hallway at five in the morning, barefoot and in his boxers, knowing he had to be back in his own bed when his fellow cadets came to get him for morning PT.

He didn’t have to make up excuses and lies and make sure that he and Rodney had solid alibis for any vacations they took. He didn’t have to book two hotel rooms when they only used one.

He didn’t have to check lab schedules to find out which labs were empty when.

He didn’t have to keep an eye on every ROTC cadet anymore.

He could live the same, normal life that any two people in love lived, one which the majority of them took for granted.

He didn’t have to live two separate lives anymore. His heart ached for a moment when he realized that it hadn’t exactly been his choice.

What he had always dreamed of was to be able to live both of his lives at the same time and live with both of the things he loved at the same time.

Now, he had lost one of them forever, but he could still be with the other one. And now, nobody was going to prevent him from telling the world that he loved Rodney McKay and had for years and that he was the luckiest guy in the world.

John, not Rodney.

Why Rodney was still here was a complete mystery to him. He pushed that thought out of his mind, determined to tackle that mystery when he wasn’t so tired.

He wheeled himself forward and reached up to gently trace the edge of the picture frame, staring at their smiling faces.

For the first time since he had woken up, he realized how enormously his life was going to change. It had been so long since he had been in a relationship where secrets and hiding wasn’t part of the norm that he didn’t think he remembered how to do it any other way.

His thoughts were interrupted when Rodney suddenly appeared beside him.

“Hey. What are you staring at? The TV’s not on, idiot.”

John waved a dismissive hand, still staring at the photograph. Rodney followed his gaze and grinned. Leaning down beside John, he put his arms around him from behind and put his lips right beside John’s ear.

“You know what? We should go make out right in front of General Renton’s office tomorrow,” he whispered into John’s ear.

“You know what? We really shouldn’t. Unless you want to be arrested for murder when the General drops dead from a stroke.”

Rodney snorted into his ear. “That I’d like to see.”

John batted at his head and Rodney nipped his ear before laughing and ducking away, leaving John staring at the photograph and wondering how they were going to do this.


	7. Strange New World I

Trying to be as quiet as possible, John pulled himself out of bed and into his chair. Flicking off the brakes, he rolled himself to the drawer and pulled out some clean boxers and socks. Wheeling himself to the closet, he pulled out a pair of sweats and then strained up to grab a shirt. There was no way he could reach the hanger but after jerking on the corner of the shirt, he finally managed to yank it off the hanger.

The hanger swayed wildly and hit the back of the closet and John winced and glanced over his shoulder. The lump that was Rodney hadn’t even stirred.

John glared at the hanger for a long moment until he was sure it had gotten the message.

Then he started the painstakingly long, slow process of getting dressed. He always changed his shirt first, since that was easiest.

Then he hoisted himself off his chair and to the floor. Getting out his boxers while in his chair was a skill he hadn’t yet mastered.

Lying flat, he managed to wiggle and twist and yank at the boxers until they came down and then he sat up and managed to jerk them all the way off.

He looked up and stared across the room to the laundry hamper. Looking up at his chair and then across the room again, he cursed under his breath. What would have been a two second job before would now be a long, tiring chore.

He decided to take the easy way out and throw the boxers in the general direction of the hamper. He watched them sail through the air and land smack on top of the hamper. Cheering quietly to himself, he mentally congratulated himself before he turned back to the task of dressing.

It really wasn’t that bad once he got used to it, he just needed more practice. First, he pulled one leg up, inserted it into one hole in the boxers, put the leg down, pulled up other leg, put it into the other hole, then used one hand to jerk the boxers up while the other hand supported him as he rocked side to side, pulling them up in inch by inch.

Repeating the entire process for the sweats, and then pulling up one leg at a time to put socks on each foot, and voila, John was dressed. And exhausted.

Realizing he was breathing hard and mildly sweating, he glanced up at his chair. The Empire State Building didn’t seem to be as high up as his chair did at that moment.

So he flopped back down on the floor. He knew that all he had to do was holler and Rodney would tumble out of bed and stick him into his chair and he would be rolling away in two seconds flat, but Rodney was still exhausted.

Rolling to his stomach, John pursed his lips and for a moment considered crawling out of the room like that and not bothering with the chair.

Then he looked up,  — way up — at where the door knob was and realized he would never be able to reach it.

Damn it. So the chair it was.

Making sure the brakes were on, he yanked, dragged and swore his way upwards until he was finally in his chair.

He glanced at the clock. Christ. He’d gotten up twenty three minutes ago. It took him longer to get dressed than some primpers he knew.

Wheeling himself forward, he reached up and quietly turned the doorknob. Opening the door was one thing, wheeling himself through it was okay, but shutting the door behind him was another matter.

No matter how much he twisted and grabbed for the door over his shoulder, he couldn’t reach it.

Gritting his teeth and wishing he had a gun to shoot the door knob off with, he let his arms slump back into his lap. Screw the door. He’d just have to be quiet.

Wheeling through the living room, he spied Cat sitting on the couch and he quickly held his finger to his lips. She blinked at him and then stared past him at the open bedroom door, as if to make a point.

“I know, I know. If you can close it then get over there and do it,” John whispered. She blinked again and then curled up on the armrest of the couch and went back to watching him.

Rolling his eyes at his strange roommate, he went into the bathroom and he reached up to the sink and realized he couldn’t reach the taps. Grabbing the edge of the counter, he managed to hoist himself up until he was lying half way in the sink and dangling off the floor.

Gasping for breath, he turned the tap on, only to yelp when he was hit in the face with  a stream of cold water. Jerking his head back, he slammed the back of his head into the faucet.

Biting his lip hard to keep from letting out a yell of pain, he fumbled blindly and managed to turn the faucet off.

Blinking water out of his eyes, he shook his head and decided he had had enough water for now. Grimacing at the way the counter was digging into his ribs, he slowly maneuvered himself backwards, praying hard that he was over his chair.

Balancing on his arms and ignoring at the way they shook from the exertion, he sucked in harsh breaths between clenched teeth, prayed one last time, and let himself drop backwards.

And promptly missed his chair.

He landed half on the floor and half on his chair with a thud and his chair tipped over and deposited him neatly on the floor.

Thankfully, he managed to make a mad grab for his chair before it could fall over and wake Rodney.

Wiping water off his face, he resisted the urge to punch a hole into the cupboards beside his head and instead, forced himself to calm down and get back into his chair.

Once that was done, he carefully moved backwards out of the bathroom and went to the kitchen.

He might take half an hour to get dressed and couldn’t wash himself, but he could at least get himself some cereal. Cat hopped off the couch and padded over to him, nearly winding up underneath his wheels, meowing suggestively.

Fine. He could feed the cat too.

He hunted around in the lower cupboards until he found a can of cat food. Holding it out for her inspection, he waited while she sniffed the can and then meowed again, obviously approving. He reached up and grabbed the can opener out of the drawer and opened the can. Dumping the contents into her bowl by his feet, he was about to rinse out the can when he realized he couldn’t reach that faucet either. Gritting his teeth, he put the can opener back and left the can on the counter, glaring at it.

Oblivious to his sudden mood change, Cat eagerly started eating her breakfast. Watching her made him hungry and he decided to ignore the stupid sink and get his cereal.

He stared around the kitchen and then remembered that his Lucky Charms were in the lower cupboards. Wheeling over, he yanked it open and pulled out the box, feeling like he had won a trophy of some kind.

Triumphantly, he set it on the table and then wheeled over to the fridge. Opening it, he had to make a few groping attempts to grab the milk, but thankfully, it was close enough so he could grab it.

He brought it over to the table too and then wheeled over to get himself a spoon.

Just one last thing to get. He slowly spun the chair around and stared up at the cupboard way above his head. The harder he stared at it, the more it seemed there was a leering face painted on the wood.

He glared back. After all he’d been through, there was no way in hell a small cupboard would get the better of him.

Wheeling over, he parked the chair and reached up, grabbing the counter and slowly grunted and swore until he had pulled himself up. His arms burned and he lay flat on his stomach, his legs dangling uselessly below him. He sent a silent thank-you for the hours of pull-ups he had been forced to do during rehab. Apparently they knew their stuff.

Reaching up, he blindly felt along the edge of the cupboard until he felt the door and pulled it open.

Staring at the wall that was centimeters from his face, he slowly let his fingers explore the cupboard above is head, hoping that the bowls were somewhere close to the edge. From this angle, there was no way he could see into the cupboard without levitating.

He felt the cool edges of ceramics on his fingertips and strained upwards until he could feel the depression in the dish.

“Score,” he whispered to himself, grinning smugly as he grabbed the edge of the bowl with two fingers and pulled it to the edge of the cupboard. He felt it snag on something but yanked harder, more determined than ever to have his cereal.

A moment later, he heard things shifting above his head and he had enough time to think “Oh, shit,” before a cascade of dishes rained down behind him, smashing onto the floor with a crash loud enough to wake the dead and sent Cat running away into the bathroom, leaving her breakfast behind.

Covering his head with his arms, he shielded himself from getting a concussion before letting his arms flop to the counter with his head following.

The silence lasted a few seconds before he heard a thump from the bedroom.

“What was that? Are you okay? Are we having an earthquake? What time is it? What the hell are you doing on the counter?”

John didn’t raise his head.

He heard Rodney sprinting across the room, still muttering frantic questions and answering half of them before starting other ones.

“Rodney, I’m fine. Stop. You’re not wearing anything on your feet. You’ll get cut.”

“Fine? _Fine_? Why are you on the counter amid a mess that would make a bull in a china shop look coordinated?!” Rodney was hopping around, pulling on his runners as he ranted.

John raised his head an inch and stared at the far wall for a moment before anger flooded him. He couldn’t even get a fucking bowl out of a cupboard by himself without it turning into a disaster.

Pushing himself backwards, he shoved himself off the counter and nearly landed on the floor before he heard feet crunching over broken shards of dishes and felt hands grabbing him under the armpits and steering him into his chair.

“You idiot, you absolute idiot! Why didn’t you wake me? It would have taken me two seconds to get you a bowl—”

“Yeah and it takes me an hour, I get it, Rodney! Shut the fuck up about it already!”

Rodney blinked at him, still half asleep and half panicked from thinking the building was falling down. “Huh?”

John jerked the brakes off his chair and spun it around and wheeled through the mess of dishes towards the bedroom.

Really, he wanted to go somewhere and hide and wait until his cheeks stopped burning from embarrassment and anger. But it was hard to hide in a chair.

He stopped just inside the doorway and reached over to slam the door shut, only to realize that he couldn’t reach it.

His hands shook as he covered his face with his hands.

He heard Rodney come into the room behind him and heard the creak of the bed as he sat on it.

“Tell me this is a bad dream, Rodney. Tell me this is a nightmare that I’m going to wake up from and have my life back.”

Rodney sighed and stared down at his hands for a long moment. “You know it’s not. This is what life is now and we have to find a way to deal with it.”

“I can’t.”

“It’ll take time — ”

John jerked his hands down and glared at him, pointing out into the kitchen. “Didn’t you see that fucking mess out there?! I can’t, Rodney!”

“It’ll take time,” Rodney yelled back, his voice overriding John’s.

“How much time?”

“I don’t know,” Rodney forced himself to stop yelling. Then he slid to his knees before the chair and squeezed John’s hand. “I told you, weeks ago that we’d figure this out, didn’t I? We can’t expect life to go back to our old normal. We have to find a new normal. And that’ll take time.”

John stared at the far wall, letting Rodney’s words sink in. He had been letting himself drift in delusions, he knew that. A part of him had always been quietly hoping that the doctors were wrong, that Rodney was wrong and he would just start walking again.

But clinging onto that hope would only frustrate him and wasn’t fair to Rodney. He glanced up at Rodney and stared at him for a long moment.

Then he reached up to his neck and gently pulled his dog tags off his neck. Picking up one of Rodney’s hands, he pressed the metal chain and rectangles into it and curled his hand closed over them.

“John — ”

“Put these away somewhere, Rodney.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I have to start over, Rodney. I can’t do that while I cling onto my tags and what they stand for.”

Rodney stared at him for a long moment and then down at the tags in his hands. Nodding to himself, he got up and put them in their bedside table drawer, shutting the drawer with a gentle click.

“You know where they are if you change your mind.”

“I don’t need my tags to live, Rodney. I need you to live.”

Kneeling before his chair, Rodney pulled John’s hands up and kissed them. Letting them drop in his lap, he pushed himself up.

 “Come on. The milk’s going to go bad if we let it sit out and we both need breakfast.”

“We don’t have any bowls.”

“So we’ll use the big cups. Same difference.”

Turning John’s chair around, Rodney wheeled him out to the table and parked him there while he got the large cups. They quietly ate their breakfast and then Rodney got the broom and dustpan out and swept up the broken shards while John held the garbage bag.

Then Rodney went to the phone to call Jeannie—who was sleeping upstairs in John’s old apartment—and asked if she felt like coming dish shopping with them, while John went to apologize to Cat for interrupting her breakfast.

*          *          *

He swore as he pulled out the catheter and showed it to Rodney who was brushing his teeth.

“Nufing?” Rodney mumbled around a mouth full of toothpaste, frowning at the nearly empty tube.

John shrugged. “It’s the fucking jet lag. It’s thrown my whole fucking routine to shit.”

Rodney leaned over and spat into the sink. “Nice language, soldier boy.”

“Bite me.” John pulled off the latex gloves and tossed them into the trashcan beside the toilet.

Taking the tubing from John and rinsing it with one hand, he handed John his toothbrush with the other. “Would you relax? Like you said, jet lag. In a few days, your body will get used to the new eating and drinking schedule and things will be fine.”

John brushed his teeth, feeling betrayed by his own bladder. Come to think of it, his bowels hadn’t been cooperating with him either since they had gotten back. It was like a damn conspiracy.

When he was done, he reached up for the small cup he kept on the edge of the counter and spat into it.

Rodney took the cup from him and rinsed it out and then put a small bit of water into it for John to rinse with and spit back into the cup. Then Rodney rinsed it out again and put it, the toothbrush and catheter away.

“Come on, I’m exhausted. Who knew shopping with my sister would be such a chore? Like it matters whether all our dishes are one color or not.”

Yawning, Rodney stumbled into the bedroom and fell into bed. John stopped to grope at the wall until he turned the lights off and then wheeled himself over to the bed and hoisted himself into it. Arranging his legs, he leaned back and pulled the covers up. He took a second to make sure the timer on his watch was on and set properly.

Every three hours, he had to be woken up and turn himself and his legs over to prevent getting pressure sores or clots in his legs. It was tedious, but it was necessary and Rodney would fly off the handle if John would attempt to keep his watch off during the night or shrug it off as something not important.

Within moments, he was asleep.

Half way through the night, John woke up. He frowned, thinking his alarm had gone off but when he checked it, he discovered that it wasn’t due to go off for another twenty minutes.

He rolled over, thinking Rodney had nudged him, when he felt it.

He froze. His stomach felt oddly warm.

And wet.

He frowned, completely confused for a moment, until he gingerly lifted the covers and smelt the pungent air streaming from beneath and nearly gagged.

Oh, my god.

He had wet his bed. Actually, from the smell of it, he hadn’t only wet the bed.

He lay frozen under the covers, trembling from disbelief. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping that if he opened them again, that he would be in a dry, clean bed and this hadn’t happened.

He opened them. The smell was still there. His shirt still felt soaked. And although he couldn’t feel it, he knew his legs and boxers were soaked and covered in crap too.

Bringing his hands up to his face, he squeezed his eyes shut, feeling hot tears of humiliation trying to squeeze out of the corners.

Then he felt the bed shifting slightly beside him and he remembered Rodney.

He debated trying to get out of bed himself, but he couldn’t leave Rodney in a disgusting bed. But that meant waking him up and telling him what he had done.

Wiping the tears off his cheeks, he pressed his lips together and stared hard at the ceiling until he felt himself under a bit more control before he pushed himself up to his elbows and gently shook Rodney.

Rodney snuffled sleepily and remained where he was.

“Rodney!” John whispered, hating at how his voice cracked. He swallowed and tried again, shaking Rodney harder. “Rodney, wake up.”

Groaning, Rodney finally rolled over and squinted at him through the darkness. “The alarm didn’t go off,” he mumbled.

“I know.” John stared at him, wondering if he could somehow get Rodney out of the room without tipping him off. “I need you to get up and go wait on the couch for me.”

Rodney blinked and obviously needed a few moments for the words to sink in.

“What? Why? And what’s that smell? Is the toilet overflowing? Did that psych mooch trade us an apartment with crap plumbing? Oh, the psych department will pay. On second thought, forget the psych department, the entire arts faculty will pay.”

John felt his chin quiver and new tears threatened to burn through his eyes. “No. Just, please, Rodney, go.”

Rodney was slowly waking up and he pushed himself up and stared at John, for the first time, growing concerned. “What’s wrong? Tell me.”

“Please, Rodney. Just don’t ask anything. I’ll take care of it. Just, please.” His voice was catching on the painful lump in his throat and he brushed a hand across his eyes to keep the tears at bay.

“Fuck ‘don’t ask anything’. What’s wrong?” Rodney moved his leg as he sat up even more, and John could see him jerk when he felt the wet spot.

“What the hell?” Rodney frowned for one moment, until he put it all together. For one tiny second, shock covered his face, but that was quickly repressed.

He shoved the covers off himself and leapt out of bed. “Jesus, John, you should have just said something.”

He went around to the other side of the bed and threw the covers back—both of them reeling slightly from the smell—but nevertheless grabbing John under the armpits and under brown streaked, soaking wet legs and pulled him off the bed.

He quickly walked out of the room and carried John into the bathroom, all the while, murmuring “It’s okay, it’s okay” into John’s hair.

John managed to keep himself in check until Rodney lowered him into the tub. When Rodney reached up to turn the taps on, John finally let out a sob.

“It’s not fucking okay, Rodney! It’s not!” he cried, his body shaking from the sobs he had tried to keep at bay.

Rodney paused where he was testing the water temperature. He glanced up.

“It’s just jet lag, John. You even said so yourself. Just like everything else, it’ll take time. I thought we had this covered. In a few weeks, you’ll be laughing when you remember how tough it was at first. All paraplegics go through this at first. You know that, you read the same booklets I did and watched the same cheesy eighties documentaries that they made us watch at rehab.”

John shook his head. “I know that, that’s not the point.”

Rodney grabbed for the sponge and soap and frowned at him. “Then what is?”

“It’s not okay, Rodney! That’s what’s wrong. Why is this okay for you? This can’t be what you want! Otherwise, you’re crazy or drugged or have mysterious things planned and I have to tell you that my disability pay isn’t that great.”

Rodney abruptly turned off the water. “We’ve been over this, John. I’m here because I want to be.”

“You want this?! You want to have to wake up at two in the morning to wash shit off me and change piss soaked sheets?!”

“Of course I don’t _want_ to!” Rodney realized he was yelling too and found himself so glad that they had moved to the first floor. “If you were anybody else, I wouldn’t even consider it. But I want to be with you, John.”

“Why?”

“ _Why_? Because I love you. I love you so insanely much that I would do anything, go anywhere, say anything, as long as you were with me. And most of all, I wish —  I wish so damn much that you would believe me.”

He dropped the sponge into the tub and covered his face with his hands, leaning on the side of the tub.

John stared at him for a long moment, before ducking his head. Rodney glanced up and sighed. He knew that John still didn’t believe him, didn’t understand.

“You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”

John’s head jerked up. “Of course I would.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”

Rodney stared at him sadly. “Why do you believe it when it comes from you but you won’t believe it when it comes from me?”

John sighed. “It’s not you. It’s me. I’m not worth what you’re giving me, Rodney. And I’m scared that one day you’ll realize that.”

“And I’m scared that you’ll never understand that you _are_ worth it. Every bit of it.”

They stared at each other for a moment, knowing they had met a stalemate. “I wish I could believe you,” John whispered.

Rodney reached over and caressed his cheek. “Me too.”

Leaning towards each other, they shared a quick kiss. Then Rodney wrinkled his nose. “Now if you don’t mind, you really need a bath.”

John snorted and leaned back, letting Rodney turn the water back on.

It took half an hour until Rodney had pulled his soiled boxers and shirt off and put them in a garbage bag and scrubbed John and himself clean. Then he lifted him out, dried him off and let John struggle into a new shirt and boxers while Rodney went into their bedroom and stripped the bed. Putting the soiled blanket and sheet into the same garbage bag, he quickly grabbed new sheets and some spare blankets. He covered the top of the soiled mattress with garbage bags, covered them with the sheet and tossed the blankets on top.

Then he went back to the couch where John was watching some late night talk show and ignored his protests as he carried him back to bed.

“Shut up. We both need sleep and I can’t sleep with you taking forever wheeling yourself in here. Besides, you’re getting a free ride. Quit complaining.”

The next morning, John called a nearby store and had them deliver a new mattress. Rodney waited until night had fallen before he wrestled the old soiled mattress out of their building and into a nearby dumpster.

They didn’t speak of it again, but they left the garbage bags underneath the sheets.

*          *          *

The quiet, yet incessant beeping jerked John out of sleep and he groaned as he pressed the small button on the side of his watch to make it shut up. They had been back for a week and the jet lag was finally wearing off, the only downside being that now his alarm really tore him out of deep sleep every time it went off.

Trying not to wake Rodney, he rolled his upper body over and then reached down to pull his legs along with him. While he struggled to grab his right leg and pull it over without shifting the bed too much, he heard a small groan from beside him.

Moments later, Rodney threw an arm over John and groped around under the covers until he had grabbed John’s left leg and gently pulled it over. Then he moved his hand and tugged his right leg over before pulling his arm out, rolling back over and going right back to sleep.

John had to bite his cheeks to keep from laughing out loud. Rodney seemed to be getting used to the constant waking up more than he was.

He would still jerk awake, confused and wondering why he had set his alarm to go off at two in the morning and whether PT really was starting that early.

Then he would try to swing his legs over to get up, and he would remember.

No PT. No running. Instead, it was rolling over time.

Rodney never complained, never swatted at him with a pillow, nor did he ignore it, even if John kept his arm under a pillow to muffle the sound. He would always wake up, reach over, move John’s legs and go right back to sleep, as if he would be the one developing sores or clots if he didn’t.

John smiled at the lump sleeping beside him. He pushed himself up to his elbows and slowly pulled himself closer to Rodney. He nuzzled his neck with the tip of his nose and kissed it as a silent thank you.

Then he lay back down and wrapped an arm around Rodney’s waist pulling him closer to him.

He smiled when Rodney never even stirred.

He’d be damned if he knew why Rodney put up with all this. Why he never complained. Why he never said he’d had enough. John knew Rodney loved him, but he also knew deep down that he wasn’t worth this kind of love. Affection, sure, but the unconditional love Rodney was giving him — no.

If John didn’t love him and weren’t selfish, he would do his best to get Rodney as far away from him as possible so Rodney could give that love to someone who really deserved it. But John did love him. And need him. And want him.

He knew he was being a selfish bastard and that one day, Rodney would realize what a gift he had been wasting on someone who completely didn’t deserve it and he would hate John forever, but until then, John would selfishly cling to the best thing that had ever happened to him. Whether he deserved it or not. And damn his conscience.


	8. Strange New World II

“— just have to suck it up. We’re not getting some cheap piece of junk. You gave them your legs, the least they can do is give you a classy substitute.”

John wheeled himself through their apartment’s foyer behind Rodney, only half listening to him badgering the US military and trying to justify the expensive chair he and John were going to buy. Campus security had told him to keep the chair for as long as he wanted, but an incident from a few days ago had prompted the need to get his own, better quality chair.

He had been getting dressed on the floor and had started dragging himself back up into the chair when the whole thing tipped forward and had fallen on top of him. Not only had it taken John forever to untangle himself from the chair, but the edge of the brakes had scraped his arm.

The resulting tiny gash and the extra minutes of fuss caused to John’s life were made out to be a debilitating scar and a traumatic incident when Rodney went to General Renton. The General had told him that, of course, the US military would pay for a new chair. He had probably seen the light erupting in Rodney’s eyes and had been quick to make some restrictions. They’d pay for one chair, and it would have to be a manual chair. And no —  no satin pillows.

So here they were, going chair shopping. John hurriedly wheeled after Rodney, hoping that they ran into as few people as possible. He still wasn’t completely comfortable being seen in public in his chair, mostly because he hated the stares and the pitying looks complete strangers gave him.

At the door, Rodney pushed it open, still talking a mile a minute and forgot to keep it open for John. Not for the first time, John wished that they had an automatic door opener.

Just before the door crashed shut in his face, a hand came up from behind him and grabbed it.

John glanced over his shoulder. “Have I mentioned I love you, Jeannie?”

She laughed. “Not today.” She waited for John to wheel himself through before coming up behind him.

“Hey, Mer!”

Rodney paused his tirade—“Who is he to tell us we can’t get satin pillows attached to the chair, or an automatic drink dispenser?”—and only half turned around.

“Yeah, what? And don’t call me Mer in public, Jeannie, we’ve been over this a million times.”

“I’ll stop calling you Meredith when you start remembering to hold doors open for John.”

Rodney looked momentarily confused but then looked horrified. “Did I do it again? Shit, I’m sorry, John. Why don’t you say anything?”

“And try to interrupt your monologue? I wouldn’t have a chance.”

Rodney opened his mouth either to berate himself or make a snappy retort, but he was interrupted by the cab pulling up.

*          *          *

As soon as they entered the store, all three of them paused, taking a moment to stare around in wonder.

John had had no idea that entire stores existed full of stuff a physically handicapped person needed.

Rodney snapped out of his daze faster and immediately marched over to where the manual wheelchairs were. Rows and rows of wheelchairs covered half the floor, chairs of all colors, shapes and sizes.

John and Jeannie followed him as Rodney started marching through the rows, already dismissing half of them after reading the name of the alloy used to make the framing.

The ones he didn’t automatically dismiss, he sat in, wiggled around and mostly grimaced and got up, saying that John would get pressure sores or back problems within hours of sitting in them. Not that John didn’t already have back problems.

Jeannie and John shared amused glances until Rodney yelled over for her to come and sit in a few of them too.

John sat back, watching the two McKays exploring different chair options.

They took turns sitting in them, twisting them around and inspecting every inch on them, launching into debates on the pros and cons of different turning radii and wheel spokes spacings.

When they found a chair that they deemed good enough, they brought it over to John. Rodney would quickly lift him up and throw him into the chair and immediately order him to start wheeling this way and that and turn 180 degrees and do full spins and speed up and slow down.

Jeannie did one better and she and Rodney quickly organized an obstacle course in the middle of the store, much to the amused glances of other shoppers and employees who had long ago stopped their own browsing to observe them.

John had to turn around sharp corners, stop on a dime, spin in tight circles, go backwards and get in and out of his chair from the floor and from other chairs.

Then Jeannie and Rodney each jumped into chairs and started racing John around the store, trying to ram into him before he got to the end of the aisle.

Both McKays ended up beating him, solely because John was laughing so hard the whole time that he could barely see where he was going.

The one time that it looked like he would reach the end of the aisle before Rodney did, Rodney gave up half way through, jumped out of his chair and leapt into John’s lap and stuck his foot out in front of him, grinning widely and yelling in John’s ear that as a result, he had crossed the finish line first and had still won.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had had this much fun. He was half afraid that the store would kick them out, but from the grins on the employees faces, it was obvious that this wasn’t the type of store to generate a lot of laughs.

They finally settled on a dark red chair which had a framework, turning radius and spoke distance that pleased all three of them. It also folded up easily—which was essential when they had to catch a cab somewhere—and had small front and backwheels to prevent easy tipping—and thus, hopefully averting anymore ‘horrendous’ incidences—a cup holder, and storage spaces on the sides and underneath the seat—for when John had to lug around stuff he couldn’t hold in his lap.

After John declared it was comfortable and fast enough, they moved on to explore the rest of the store with Rodney snagging one of the still laughing employees and demanding that he explain everything about everything they had in the store.

Within moments, John determined that he wanted to pack up the entire store and bring it home with him.

They went to see the optional chair cushions first. They could choose from all colors, shapes, thicknesses and material. They spent a great deal of time arguing about foam versus gel pads, but then decided to get the cheaper foam pads so they could get a back cushion too.

The employee—Zack it turned out—showed them bed rails which could easily be fit to the sides of bed to make getting into and out of bed easier, but after seeing the price tag of $200 attached to nearly all of them, they had to sadly pass them up.

Zack went on to show them the bathroom accessories, such as toilet rails—at which Rodney quickly pointed out that he could make their own—and hand held shower heads—which made John nearly cry with relief. Zack showed them how they could attach the bar to which the shower head could be hung at any height so Rodney could move it up for when he needed it and John could move it back down. John could actually bathe himself without water spraying down on him from five feet over his head. Rodney’s eyes lit up when he saw a jet spa set but as soon as John saw the $100 price tag, he and Jeannie quickly pulled Rodney along, with Rodney loudly complaining that it would be for his bad back so it was a medical purchase. John had retorted that out of the two of them, he had the worse back and he was fine without a jet spa.

They also quickly passed by the incredibly useful but incredibly expensive section featuring assistive living furniture, such as tray tables which could be easily pulled up to a bed, lifting cushions, adjustable beds, and most incredibly of all, stair lifts. They had one set up beside the stairs which led up to the store’s storage space and Rodney immediately hoisted John into the chair attached to the track running along the railing. Before John could protest, Rodney had pushed the button and John found himself slowly zooming up the stairs. He stared in amazement from the top of the stairs, realizing how long it bad been since he had been off the ground.

Rodney was absolutely thrilled about it, but knew it wasn’t practical for them since they couldn’t buy stair lifts for every building on campus, not to mention the fact that once he was at the top, John wouldn’t have a chair to get back into.

Next came the no-hands hardware, such as automatically opening trash cans, automatic soap dispensers, and best of all, automatic faucets. Rodney already grabbed one, but when John saw the $200 tag on it, he made Rodney put it back.

Rodney looked ready to put up a huge fight about it, knowing it would make John’s life much easier, but John was firm. As of right now, neither of them were working and they were living on his disability pay which was barely nothing. They had rent to pay and neither of them would be working in classes until September came around and the military wouldn’t spring for anything more than a wheelchair, so they had to curb their spending spree a bit.

Jeannie was surprisingly quiet during their fight, siding with neither of them and quietly asking Zack about some of the automatic trash dispensers.

They moved on and came to the daily assistance section. As soon as John saw the rows upon rows of reachers, he let out such an excited yell for Rodney to come and see this that some other shoppers stared at him with alarm.

John didn’t care. He was staring at the plastic wonders that would make his life normal again.

All of them consisted of long rods with a handle on one end and gripping jaws on the other end. They had reachers of all lengths, colors and materials and John spend a good minute just staring at them, thanking whoever had come up with these things. Rodney and Jeannie started critically examining and testing different ones, looking for the perfect ones.

Finally, Rodney shoved one in John’s face and told him to try it. John grabbed it and squeezed the handle and watched the jaws snap open and shut a few times. It moved easily without much force and had an adjustable length—oh, he was ready to wage war on those bowls now!—and a hook on the side—no more yanking shirts off hangers!

John immediately grabbed himself two and turned to Rodney, who was busy arguing with Jeannie over material choices.

He held the reachers and gently moved them up and grabbed the edge of Rodney’s shirt. Slowly, he moved them up.

Rodney didn’t notice anything was wrong until his shirt was nearly over his head. He let out a yell and swatted at the reachers and tore his shirt out of their grasp before turning on John.

“If you’re going to use those things irresponsibly, we’re so not getting them.”

John laughed and stuck them into the storage spaces on his brand new chair along with the rest of their stuff.

They passed up the automatic door opener—“But you’d never have to fight with that front door ever again!”— after seeing that the cheapest one was $300.

Next, Zack showed them some dressing aids. Rodney passed by the elastic sock aids, saying he would make John one and passed up the elastic leg lifter too, declaring that he would get it for John’s seventieth birthday when it was okay for him to be too lazy to lift his legs himself. Rodney did grab a $7 dressing stick which had a simple hook on one end and a weird looking hook on the other that Zack called a ‘push-pull’ hook. John couldn’t wait to get home and try getting dressed with that thing.

Then they got to the personal health section. When Zack politely asked if John used diapers, he blushed and stammered a ‘no’ while Rodney snorted, saying he obviously hadn’t dealt with a lot of ‘John Sheppard’.

Rodney was prepared to zip past the entire section, since they got a lifetime of free gloves from the labs anyway and they still had enough suppository pills to last a month and their catheter was clean and in good condition. Zack still patiently explained everything they had and when he got to the bed pads, John stopped the chair and let Rodney continue forward, babbling to himself, before quietly asking Zack to please pass him a few packages. Zack muttered that he could put them underneath the sheets and they wouldn’t make a lot of noise but were super absorptive. John was still blushing and wouldn’t meet Zack’s eyes, but from the calm and casual way Zack explained things, it was obvious that he was used to dealing with these things anyway.

Jeannie sidled up to him and grabbed the packages, whispering that she’d go pay for them now.

John wasn’t sure why he felt uncomfortable about discussing this with Rodney, but the humiliation of that night was still fresh on his mind.

Rodney did grab a tube of cream for pressure sores and then took off to quickly examine their ramp section, not to buy one but to examine what sorts of materials they used. John yelled after him that they didn’t need a ramp in their apartment, but Rodney yelled back that the rest of campus would be another story.

Deciding not to think about that for the moment, John kept moving through the personal health section, passing by the diabetic supplies and answering Zack’s calm question about whether he wished to see the section housing their sex supplies with a strangled ‘no, thank you’.

All three of them met at the cash register where Jeannie was holding the bags containing the bed pads and ignoring Rodney’s questions about what was in them. John paid for his chair, the reachers, chair cushions, the hand-held shower head and the dressing stick.

Then they thanked Zack and went out of the store. John was so excited to get back home and try out their new toys. Rodney was hailing a cab while verbally designing the toilet and bath rails he would install.

They caught a cab—barely managing to get John’s new chair and the campus chair into the back—and got back to their apartment.

John immediately grabbed the reachers and started wheeling himself around the apartment, practicing grabbing things and moving them this way and that and letting Cat try to grab the things he lifted.

Rodney and Jeannie watched him, and after John dropped the pillow he was grabbing three times and earned a glare from Cat, Rodney declared that he wasn’t going near the kitchen until he had had a lot more practice.

Jeannie laughed and then called them over to the couch, saying she had to show them something.

John wheeled over and Rodney flopped onto the couch beside Jeannie, leaning down and grabbing Cat and putting her in his lap, scratching behind her ears. Jeannie leaned over and pulled a heavy box out of one of the bags they had bought.

Wordlessly, she handed it over to Rodney. His eyes widened and he gaped at the box for a moment before he stared up at John.

“She got us one of those automatic faucets, John. The nutcase bought us a faucet!”

Jeannie laughed, thrilled to see the amazed looks on both of their faces. John turned on Jeannie.

“Jeannie, those cost two hundred bucks a piece! You shouldn’t have!”

“Hey, consider it your early birthday present.”

“My birthday’s not until October!”

“Notice I said ‘early’?”

Rodney was half laughing and half crying over the box as he clutched it to his chest before he threw it into John’s lap and turned and yanked his sister into his arms, nearly crushing Cat between them.

“Thank you, you crazy, crazy moron. Thank you.”

John stared at the box, wanting to cry too at the thought of never having to struggle with the taps in the bathroom again.

After Rodney released Jeannie, John tossed the box back at him and looked at Jeannie.

“Get over here and let me hug you, you crazy McKay!”

She let out another laugh and stepped over and let John hug her hard enough to nearly crush her ribs.

“Thank you. You have no idea how much easier this will make our lives.”

“That’s why I got it, silly. You think I care about money when it concerns your happiness?”

John let go of her and they slowly moved towards the bathroom, where Rodney was already busy at the sink with a wrench and the box clutched to his chest, complaining to Cat over the fact that all the instructions were in French.

John waited a full five minutes until he pointed out that the English was on the other side, but by then, Rodney had thrown them away and was busy doing it on his own.

Knowing never to interrupt a physicist when he was pretending to be a plumber, John went back to practicing lifting Rodney’s shirt hem with his new reacher, and ignoring Cat’s disapproving looks from where she lay curled on the bathroom counter, amid Rodney’s clutter of tools and plumbing parts.

*          *          *

Rodney leaned back against the wall and stared at John while he put his shirt on a hanger and then grabbed it with his reacher to hang it into the closet. Then he yanked open the drawers and used the reacher to grab a shirt from inside it. Hanging the reacher to the side of his chair, he pulled the shirt over his head and then spun the chair around and wheeled himself up to the bed.

That was when he noticed Rodney staring at him.

“What?”

“You’re getting pretty good there, stud. We’ve only had the reachers for two days.”

John hoisted himself onto the bed. “I’ve been practicing.” As he shifted himself over, he heard the slight crunch of the bed pads underneath the sheets.

Rodney had caught him putting the bed pads underneath the sheet two night ago, replacing the garbage bags. He had stood in the doorway, quietly watching. When John didn’t say anything, Rodney didn’t either and came in and helped him pull the sheets back. They never mentioned it since, both of them going outside afterwards to see Jeannie off, who was flying back up to Canada.

The pads had become a part of their lives as much as the chair itself had. It didn’t mean they had to dwell on a subject that embarrassed John.

Rodney chuckled. “Taking my shirt off doesn’t count.”

John rolled himself until he was lying across Rodney’s stomach and grinned up at him. “Sure it does.”

Rodney rolled his eyes and ran his fingers through John’s hair. “Your mop’s growing back.”

“No more regulation hair cuts.” John waggled his eyebrows and Rodney grinned.

John spent a moment poking at Rodney’s belly button with his finger until Rodney laughed and swatted at him, telling him to quit being weird.

John grabbed his hand and held it down as he nuzzled Rodney’s stomach with his nose. Staring up at Rodney, he kissed his stomach, moving downwards and planting small kisses just above the waistband of his boxers.

He saw Rodney’s pupils growing wider and he smiled, snapping the elastic of the boxers. “Get these off.”

Those were the last words he said for a while, his mouth busy doing things more pleasant than talking.

Rodney stayed splayed out for a few moments after John was done, letting his breathing calm down and his brain get back into the right solar system.

John grinned as he watched him slowly coming back to himself.

Finally, his eyes opened and he looked down at John. “Get up here, you.”

John crawled up Rodney’s body and Rodney grabbed him and flipped them over. Grabbing John’s chin, he kissed him, his tongue pushing past John’s lips with a groan.

They spent long minutes letting their tongues slide around each other, moving from John’s mouth into Rodney’s and back again.

Then Rodney drew back and grinned at him. “My turn.”

John frowned for a moment, not understanding what Rodney was talking about. Then he realized that Rodney had forgotten.

“Rodney — ”

“Shut up. My turn.”

John sat up and grabbed Rodney’s hand as it slid down his side towards his unresponsive, completely uninterested lower half.

“Rodney, stop. There’s no point, remember?”

Rodney froze for a minute, blinking at him with a politely confused look on his face, before he let his gaze go down to John’s groin.

It took a few seconds, but it finally hit him. He stared back up at John, his face suddenly filling with determination

“We can still try. Maybe you’ll feel a tiny little something. Maybe we just have to try really hard and maybe it’ll take longer than usual but we — ”

John shook his head and gave Rodney a sad smile. “You know that won’t happen. I’ve tried, Rodney, but there’s nothing going on down there anymore. I’m sorry.”

Rodney gaped at him. “You’re — you’re apologizing to me? Your sex life is ruined and you’re apologizing to me?”

“My sex life isn’t ruined. Not unless you suddenly decided to be celibate.”

“What? Are you dumb?”

“You see? I’ve still got a sex life. It’s just slightly different than before.”

Rodney let his hands fall into his lap and spent a few minutes staring at them before he looked back up at John.

“How am I supposed to make you feel good?”

John stared at him like he was nuts. “You make me feel good every day, you moron.”

“Not your cock.”

“That’s one small part of me. But seeing you satiated is enough for me. It has to be. And for everything else, I’m happier than I have any right to be.”

Rodney frowned at him. “You’re okay with this.”

He shrugged. “How else can I be? I’ve known about this for a long time, Rodney. We just haven’t had time to fool around for a while so you haven’t had time to think about it. I have.”

Rodney stared at him for another moment before he crawled over and lay down in John’s arms, pulling the covers up over both of them.

He rested his head on John’s chest. They were quiet for a long time while John checked the alarm on his wristwatch and reached up to flick the lights off.

Rodney shifted in the darkness. “So you’re really okay with this?”

“If I had to choose between being impotent and not having you, that’s no choice. I can live without having orgasms. I can’t live without you.”

Rodney turned his head and kissed him on the neck. “So now that we’re minus one essential part of our sex lives, we’re going to have to find some substitutes.”

“I’ve already given that some thought.”

“Oh, have you?”

“Yup.”

“John Sheppard, the thoughts that occupy your mind sometimes really scare you.”

“These thoughts won’t. You’ll like them. I guarantee. I just have to order something on the internet.”

There was silence for a minute. “You’re not getting something inflatable.”

A laugh. “Go to sleep, Rodney.”

“Or pink handcuffs. I’m not wearing handcuffs. Besides, what if you fall off the bed and can’t get back up on it and I won’t be able to get out of them?”

“Good night, Rodney.”

*          *          *

Slowly, the weeks of summer went by. John became better at grabbing things with his reacher and Rodney finished installing the new shower head, faucet and adding toilet and bath tub rails. John could now brush his teeth, sit on the toilet or bathe himself with no help. Rodney still insisted on helping him out of the tub since the slippery edges of the bathtub apparently gave him nightmares features missing teeth and broken jaws.

John spent an afternoon going around to all their doors and tying rope to the doorknobs. He realized that if he went through a door and grabbed the rope along the way, he could pull the door shut behind him.

They had two more nights during which John had accidents in bed, but the bed pads did what they should and protected the underlying mattress. John didn’t do as well. He had stayed still and quiet until Rodney had put him into the bathtub and then had started sobbing, embarrassed and angry with himself. Rodney had dropped the sponge and hopped into the bathtub and gathered John into his arms, murmuring that it was all okay and that it was an accident and that they would get past this like everything else.

John started carefully monitoring what food and liquids he was consuming during the day, making tables for his scheduled eating times and bathroom times. He hung it on the fridge and whenever he was tempted to mess up the routine with an extra glass of juice or a small snack, he would remember what might end up happening that night if he strayed. Rodney started eating at the same time as John and got used to monitoring his own eating habits, which actually made him lose a bit of weight and start looking healthier, a fact that thrilled John to no end since he had been on Rodney’s case about eating healthier and more regularly for years.

To save money, John had given up his old apartment on the third floor once Jeannie had left, the university being understanding about the situation and letting John break his lease.

Since Rodney had taken on the task of going to get groceries, doing their laundry in the basement laundromat and picking up books and doing various odds and ends outside and inside of the apartment that were too difficult for John, John decided to start learning how to cook.

His cooking talents had always begun and ended with tossing frozen pizzas into the microwave and mixing water and instant macaroni and cheese in a pot. As he got better at using the reachers and learning his way around the kitchen, he started experimenting with new things. He learned how to make eggs, spaghetti (with store-bought sauce, but still, he was pretty proud of it) and even chicken wings. Rodney would hover at the nearby table, petting Cat and pretending to be reading something while he nervously watched John lift heavy pots and sizzling pans with his hands or reachers and opening the cupboards three feet above his head to lift out a stack of dishes.

There were some accidents, spoiled dinners and broken dishes but John insisted on learning how to do it by himself. Rodney only drew the line at letting him strain potfuls of pasta after the one time that John’s reacher had lost its grip on one of the handles while the pot was already tilting over the sink. The boiling water had luckily missed John but it had scared Rodney enough to make him insist on straining the pasta from then on.

John sighed and complained about it so much that Rodney finally went down to the workshop by the woodwork department and drew them a design and asked them to help him out. Two days later, Rodney came home with a wide, flat bottomed wooden bowl on a flattened ramp. John had just stared at the new contraption until Rodney demonstrated putting a full pot into the bowl and then using a side lever to tilt the entire thing over until the water and pasta had poured out and through the waiting sieve in the sink.

While Rodney was the one doing his best to fix up their apartment and make it more accessible for John, John decided to tackle their intimacy issues himself.

Without telling Rodney, he had a very embarrassing conversation with Kelly, which ended with her loaning him one of her “naughty magazines” and allowed him to order a dildo for himself. It arrived a week later and he surprised the hell out of Rodney when he told him to close his eyes the next time they were in bed together. The dildo turned out to be a blessing in disguise. John could make Rodney feel good and take his time doing whatever he wanted with him, since it wasn’t like the dildo would get tired any time soon and John wasn’t in any hurry either.

An added bonus was the fact that John could feel like he was actually having sex with Rodney, and the look on Rodney’s face was one John would gladly buy hundreds of dildos for.

John still let Rodney fuck him whenever he wanted to but it felt weird, mostly because he couldn’t feel anything. His upper body still loved being touched but nothing from his waist downwards cared about what Rodney was trying to do. Rodney was constantly worried that it wasn’t enough for John but John would always reassure him that it was. There was more to being intimate with someone than having orgasms.


	9. Outside Our Door

Mid-July Rodney was sitting in the living room, petting Cat and watching CNN while John was at his weekly rehab session down at the physio center. He sat there, staring at the screen, watching the rows and rows of flag covered coffins being lifted out of airplanes and carried past the lines of saluting soldiers and crying relatives standing beside them. It was actually a re-run of an earlier story. Most of the troops had come home from Somalia in May but Rodney hadn’t felt the need to watch CNN since. It was only by chance that he had flipped to it and when he saw the coffins, he paused and couldn’t tear his eyes off the image.

He watched a widow sobbing as a coffin was wheeled past her. She reached out a hand and let it skim the thin flag draped over it. Then she brought her hand to her mouth and nearly collapsed, her family on both sides grabbing her before she hit the ground.

The raw grief and pain on her face hit Rodney in the stomach with the force of a bullet.

That could have been him. Of course, technically, it couldn’t have been. Not being John’s next of kin and being his gay partner were two reasons he wouldn’t have been allowed to see John’s body coming home the way that these people had.

But that phone call in April could have been so much worse than those terrifying words that Lt. Col. Anders had said to him.

As he stared at the screen, that phone call echoed in his mind.

_“I’m very sorry to inform you that Captain Sheppard’s chopper was shot down yesterday. A team retrieved him and airlifted him to the field hospital here but he is badly wounded.”_

He would never forget those words as long as he lived. He still remembered the shock, the disbelief, the confusion that had filled him.

John being wounded wasn’t something he had known how to instinctively deal with. It wasn’t something Rodney could fix right away or yell at or calculate a solution for.

But John being dead would be something so much worse. He watched the sobbing widow and knew exactly how she was feeling.

How would he cope with the rest of his life if John had died that day? If his body had been flown home in a coffin? He would never hear John’s laugh again, never curl up on the couch with him and tell each other about their days, and he would never again be able to hold him while they lay in bed, content in the knowledge that he was with the one person on earth who knew him and loved him and made his life complete.

What if that one person were torn away from him forever?

Rodney blinked, feeling like he was about to throw up.

He was so consumed with grief and physical pain that he never heard the front door open or John wheel himself inside, bitching about some ass who hadn’t remembered to hold the door for him and sadistic physiotherapists.

*          *          *

John paused as he threw his keys on the table and looked around for Rodney. Seeing the back of his head over the couch, he wheeled himself over.

Rodney was staring at the television.

John only had to glance at it to know it was CNN. “Why are you watching that, Rodney? It’ll only upset both of us and you know it.” He grabbed the remote and flicked it off.

Rodney hadn’t moved. John frowned slightly and put his brakes on and hoisted himself onto the couch beside him, absentmindedly petting Cat as she crawled on his lap to say hello.

“Rodney? You okay?”

He didn’t answer, only kept staring straight ahead, his face pale and his eyes huge and frightened.

John reached out and gently turned his chin. “Hey, talk to me.”

Rodney blinked. “You came home,” he whispered hoarsely.

John nodded. “Maggie was a bitch today, but yeah, I managed. Until some dumb ass let the door slam in my face, but that’s another story.”

“No, I mean you came home.”

John blinked and it took him a moment to realize Rodney wasn’t talking about him coming home from physio.

“A bit banged up, but yeah, I came home. I told you I would try like hell to come home.”

“And you did it.”

“I know,” John said softly, searching his face and not completely understanding.

“I wouldn’t know how to do this without you.”

“Rodney—”

“You’re my everything and what would I have left if I lost my everything? What would I do?”

“I don’t know, Rodney. I wouldn’t know what to do either.”

Rodney stared at him with huge, scared eyes before grabbing him and hugging him tight enough to hurt John’s ribs. He didn’t complain. He wouldn’t pretend to understand the fear that Rodney had lived with every day that he had spent waiting for him to come home, but he could understand the fear of losing him.

Rodney was shaking as he held him, holding his shirt in tight fists and not letting go.

“I wouldn’t have cared if they would have told me that your face was burnt off and your arms and legs had been blown off, just as long as you would have come back home.”

“I know,” he said and before he knew it, memories from that fateful day came streaming back to him. He forced himself not to flinch and keep calm. This wasn’t about him. “That’s why I tried so hard. When I was in that chopper and there were flames all around me, I knew I just had to keep sitting there and I’d burn up in minutes. Then I thought about the phone call that you would get and how angry you’d be. So I decided I wasn’t going to die in there. When I started pulling myself, I realized I couldn’t feel my legs but I didn’t care. As long as I got out, I’d be able to get home.”

“I wouldn’t be angry for you dying. I’d be angry for you leaving me feeling lost.”

John squeezed him tightly. “I know,” he whispered. “I know. I’m sorry for what I put you through and I swear, I’m never leaving again.”

Rodney buried his face in John’s shoulder. “I’m so glad you came back home.”

“So am I, Rodney. So am I.”

*          *          *

The day that Rodney had watched CNN was the day that he unknowingly brought the rest of the world back into their lives.

Life had been so hectic since May that John had forgotten that there was a world outside of the university campus they lived on. After Jeannie left, they never left campus, since the stores they needed and the physio center were all within a few blocks.

John had completely forgotten how he had been disabled and about Somalia and Kuwait and the military. He forgot that he hadn’t always lived in a chair in that small apartment with Rodney and Cat but that he had been a soldier.

While he had been in the hospital recovering, the nurses had kept him supplied with nice sedative dosages to keep the flashbacks and nightmares at bay. His days were too busy for him to dwell on the past and by the time they got back to the States, John was so consumed with learning new things everyday and focusing on the here and now that his PTSD had fallen into a deep slumber.

At the time, he didn’t realize what having that conversation with Rodney would bring about, but in the long term, he guessed that it was healthier. Once the school year started, he knew he would be faced with seeing cadets everywhere around campus and there would undoubtedly be questions.

His first flashback was so terrifyingly sudden and real that John barely remembers that it was a flashback and that time hadn’t actually rewound itself.

Rodney was lying on the couch, Cat on his chest and watching America’s Funniest Home Videos on television, occasionally yelling over for John to watch whenever the pet clips or sport clips came on that John was so fond of. John was at the stove stirring mashed potatoes and occasionally lifting the lid of the frying pan to check on the status of the chicken cutlets.

He heard a laugh from the couch and glanced over to see what was so funny. A man was hopping around a campfire, the back of his pants on fire while his wife ran around behind him, fanning his ass with a newspaper, as if that would help.

John started to laugh at the sheer stupidity, when suddenly, he realized that the flames had engulfed the television. Jerking his eyes away from it and opening his mouth to scream at Rodney to get off the couch, he realized that the entire apartment was consumed with flames.

He squeezed his eyes shut, feeling the heat pressing in on him. Opening them, he realized he was sitting in his chopper. He could barely make out a stretch of sand outside of the broken window. He tried to breathe but the air was so thick with flames and smoke that he choked. The smoke stung his eyes and he brought his hands up to shield them.

He had to get out. He had to get out right now.

Turning to the broken window beside him, he reached for the broken window panes, shimmering in the heat and felt the hot glass burning his hand. He screamed but refused to let go, pulling himself forward, out of his seat.

He tried using his legs to push himself forward but they wouldn’t go. Squinting through the smoke and struggling to suck in a breath, he pulled himself forward. He thought he felt something solid and cold underneath his arms, but that didn’t make any sense because his arms were still half in the burning chopper.

“John! John, can you hear me?”

He stared through the smoke and flames, knowing that voice and desperately searching for it.

“Rodney? Rodney, I can’t see you. Where are you? There’s too much smoke.”

“John, I’m right in front of you. Look at me.”

John stared through the smoke, feeling the pain in his hands and seeing nothing but smoke.

“Where, Rodney? I can’t see you!”

He felt himself being shaken side to side, but that didn’t make any sense because he was the only one in the chopper.

“John, look! Quit focusing on the chopper and look at me! Make yourself see me!”

“I have to get out, Rodney! It’s burning, can’t you fucking see it? I have to get out!”

Why didn’t Rodney understand that? What did it matter if he could see him or not if he was about to burn up in his chopper?

He suddenly felt somebody grabbing his chin and yanking his face up, and with a suddenness that made him want to puke, he was staring Rodney in the face and he was back in their apartment.

He was lying on the floor, his hands clutching at the carpet beneath his fingers, his legs splayed out on the kitchen tiles behind him and Rodney was kneeling before him, looking absolutely terrified.

“Rodney?”

“Can you see me?”

“Yeah.” His voice was shaking as hard as he was.

“Where are you?”

John licked his dry lips and realized his hands weren’t hurting anymore. He sniffed the air and didn’t smell any smoke either. He did smell burning chicken, but that didn’t smell the same as a burning chopper. “In our apartment.” The pieces quickly fell into place. “I had a flashback, didn’t I?”

Rodney nodded wearily, starting to look less freaked out now that John had snapped out of it.

“Shit, that was a bad one.”

“I’ll say. One second you’re smiling at the television, the next you’re coughing and screaming and falling out of your chair and crawling on the floor, yelling at me that you had to get out of the chopper.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I said I was trying out for a spot on AFV, would you?”

“This isn’t funny, John! If you would have been home alone, who the hell knows how far you would have crawled and meanwhile, the stove could have lit the apartment on fire and you would have been in a fire for real! Only, not being in your chair, you wouldn’t be able to get the front door open!”

John pushed himself up while Rodney took a deep breath and got up to turn the stove off. He inspected the burnt chicken and the mass of solidified mashed potatoes.

“Well, gourmet dinner this isn’t, but we can cut the burnt bits off and add some milk to the potatoes to soften them up.”

John still sat on the floor, staring at the far wall. “Rodney, I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would be that bad.”

“It’s not your fault, John. I’ve been waiting for this for weeks. The only real question is how you’ve been suppressing it for so long.”

“I’ve been busy. I forgot.”

Rodney finished setting the table and came back and picked John up and carried him to his chair.

He knelt before him for a minute, gently holding his hands. They stared at them for a second and Rodney gently turned them over, smoothing a finger over the skin.

“You see? Not burnt. You’re okay.”

“Are you?”

“We aren’t strangers to PTSD, John. But from now on, new rule. No unsupervised cooking. Ever. You can use the microwave but that’s it.”

“Deal.”

*          *          *

Along with the chair, reachers, and bed pads, they adjusted to once more making PTSD a part of their everyday lives too.

John’s memories from the wars he had fought and his life as a soldier in combat zones came flooding back as soon as the door had been nudged back open.

Loud noises would make him throw himself from his chair to the floor, yank on Rodney until he hit the ground too and then John struggled to crawl over him to shield him with his body.

Whether he thought there were Somalians crouching behind the couch or the window and firing at them with AK-47s or whether he thought there were Iraqis shelling them, Rodney rarely found out, he just knew that John wouldn’t calm down until the noise stopped and he remembered that he was in their apartment.

Memories from both wars flew through John’s mind in no particular order and not waiting for opportune times of the day or night to appear: medivacs gone wrong, finding platoons of dead marines in a bunker where there should have been dozens of waiting, breathing ones and flying through broken cities where the pings of bullets bouncing off the helicopter’s hull were as much part of the routine noises of flight as the whipping blades were.

Some memories were more difficult on John than others. The first night that he had woken up, screaming at Rodney about tires, Rodney had suddenly really feared for John’s sanity. He hadn’t been able to get two coherent sentences out of John, and only after John had fallen back asleep, his dreams shifting from nightmares about tires to something slightly pleasanter, Rodney had gotten out of bed and padded over to the phone.

Picking it up, he rummaged through his binder of odds and ends into which he had long ago hidden a small AFROTC card which had General Renton’s phone number in the corner. Not caring that it was the middle of the night, he let the phone ring, waiting until a sleepy voice muttered a greeting on the other end.

Rodney wasted no time introducing himself, he simply demanded to know what tires had to do with Somalia.

The General had apparently thought he was some spy collecting information, but once Rodney had mentioned John, the General had gone silent for a few moments before sighing and asking if John was suffering from bad PTSD.

Rodney had snarled back that he knew damn well he was—he and every other person he had sent off to that hellhole—before he stated that really, it was none of his business and that Rodney just wanted some answers, which he then quickly got.

Apparently, the Somalians hadn’t liked the Americans tromping through their country, never mind that the Americans had only been trying to help. True, they weren’t very effective at it, but the Somalians were only capable of coming up with one solution to their problems—kill everybody else and be the last one standing.

Everybody had pledged allegiance to some war lord or another and spent their time running around and stealing anything they could get their hands on to bring back to their war lord, so he could sell it for more weapons, which his people then used to go get more stuff. Suffice it to say that when the Americans showed up and they tried to prevent people from killing each other over a scrap of metal or basket, they weren’t thanked for it.

As a result, whenever a helicopter was spied approaching a city, the people would pile tires and other junk into an intersection and lit torches would be tossed on the pile. The rubber would start burning, sending columns of thick, black smoke upwards, warning other cities that the party was about to end. Add to that the fact that dozens of civilians with guns crouched on rooftops and in open windows and spent all day if necessary firing at the helicopters, and it was easy to understand why John’s nightmares were so terrifying.

The next time that John woke up screaming about tires and for Rodney to shoot the torch bearers, Rodney grabbed him and firmly told him that the torch bearers had been eliminated, along with the snipers detected on the roofs. John had stared at him with wide, scared eyes until he had nodded. “Okay. Okay. That’s good. We might be able to land in one piece. Tell the Major we got them. Tell him, Rodney.”

“I will, John. Go back to sleep. I’ll tell him.”

The only worse nightmares were the ones when John remembered shooting children. Children as young as five were armed to the teeth just like any adult and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot somebody else, especially an American standing between them and their loot. Children would often be sent up to American transport vehicles, smiling and asking for candy until they pulled out the grenades hidden in their pockets and threw them into the vehicle or another kid crouching in an open doorway further down the street opened fire, shattering the transports windows and killing as many soldiers inside as possible.

John had been loading three injured soldiers into his chopper when he had spied a kid standing in a doorway, a gun trained on him. John had stared at him for one second before whipping out his M9 and shooting him. The kid was dead before he hit the ground.

“He must have been about seven, Rodney. It wasn’t his fault he lived where he lived. It was the only way he knew how to live.”

“And if you hadn’t killed him, he would have killed you and not only wouldn’t he have remembered or cared twenty minutes later, but those soldiers you evac’d would have died too.”

John was staring at him but through him, not having really heard him. “He was just a kid, Rodney. It wasn’t his fault.”

On nights like these when Rodney had woken up five times to roll John over and two other times from his nightmares, he decided he really didn’t like the rest of the world.

It wasn’t the US military he had a problem with, he realized, although the misguided ideals that went into a lot of their plans were often just idiotic. It was the rest of the world that he couldn’t stand.

Why couldn’t the rest of the world live on university campuses, he mused? Why couldn’t the rest of the world stop obsessing about religious tales made up by people with pretty good imaginations but not an ounce of true understanding of their world, and instead, focus on the mysteries of the science of their world? Why did people funnel their energy and intelligence into greediness, selfishness and brutality, when they could be funneling it towards unraveling knowledge?

John would always stare at him with an unreadable expression in his eyes when Rodney would bring it up.

Then he’d kiss him on the neck. “I love you, you know that?”

“What does that have to do with what I’m talking about?”

John would give him a sad smile. “Everything.”

*          *          *

At the beginning of August, Rodney ran upstairs and badgered Kelly Taylor until she hunted up two of her guy friends who were his and John’s sizes and borrowed suits from them.

After spending an hour getting dressed and having Rodney fussing with John’s hair and his own hair, they walked down to the Dean’s office and Rodney complained about the rock hard chairs while John smirked.

The Dean swept into the room, greeted them both with a smile and asked them how they were holding up.

After the pleasantries were exchanged, he sat down and folded his hands.

“Now, Dr. McKay, the way I understand it, you wish to resume your teaching and researching positions when the year starts.”

“Why else would I be here, Paul? But no first year physics.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers, Dr. McKay.”

“Do I look like a beggar to you?”

John gave the Dean a bright smile and reached over to pinch Rodney’s thigh hard to get him to shut up. The fact of the matter was that they would have to start selling off their things to pay for rent if they weren’t hired by the university like they had planned. Not to mention that there weren’t any other jobs on a university campus for them, and after having just gotten used to their apartment, there was no way they were moving any time soon. John’s disability pay wasn’t enough to support two people with no other income.

Rodney let out a muffled yelp and pasted a smile on his face.

“He’d love to teach first year physics, sir.”

The Dean fought to hide a smile. “I’m sure he would. Now, Mr. Sheppard, you are a different matter. You just finished your course work for your PhD last December, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you wish to continue doing your PhD with us, correct?”

“Yes, sir. I wasn’t sure if I would be allowed to continue due to my tour interrupting things, especially because our tour dates were up in the air for most of the time.”

The Dean’s eyes momentarily filled with sadness. “That won’t be an issue anymore, will it?” He didn’t say it maliciously but rather sadly.

Rodney snorted. “Damn straight.”

“Rodney!” John hissed under his breath.

The Dean gave him a small smile. “Mr. Sheppard, I don’t know whether it means anything to you, but we are all very proud of the soldiers who choose to continue their education at our school. I know it’s not easy to get a degree done while marching orders are constantly threatening to appear in your mail box. Of course you will be allowed to continue working towards your doctorate with us. We’ll do what we’ve done before, we’ll just pick right up where we left off.”

“That does mean a lot, sir. Thank you. The university has always been really accommodating.”

“On that note, do you still wish to remain here with us?”

“Very much, sir.”

“I meant the question as more of a long term one, Mr. Sheppard.”

“What do you mean, sir?” John was barely breathing, hoping that Dr. Kinsey was asking him what he thought he was asking.

“We’d very much like to keep you for the long term, Mr. Sheppard. Your TA evaluations were stellar and the students all enjoyed your classes and loved the fact that you were always quite punctual concerning your office hours. The reviews of your thesis were exemplary and your advisor was very adamant about us doing our best to hang on to you.”

“You’re very welcome to hang on to me as long as you want, sir.”

Dr. Kinsey smiled. “How would you like to start teaching in September?”

“As in TAing?”

“No, Mr. Sheppard. As in having your own class and having TAs working for you.”

“You want me to be a prof?”

“An assistant professor, yes.”

Rodney leaned forward. “Hang on a second, Paul. You’re not going to put John in front of a class of morons just so he can be your poster boy for this place’s diversity policy.”

John’s smile strained itself. “Rodney, shut the hell up, please,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth.

“No, I will not shut the hell up. If he just wants to use you as a ‘we love handicapped people’ promotional tool—”

“Then he would have made a point of pointing out the fact that I’m a paraplegic from the second I walked in the door, but so far, Dr. Kinsey hasn’t even looked at the chair or commented about it.”

“He’s just being covert.”

“McKay, if you don’t shut it, I will reach over there and prove to you that this cripple still has incredible upper body strength. I’m trying to get a job here. Shut it.”

Turning back to Dr. Kinsey, John struggled not to laugh at seeing the Dean trying very hard not to laugh.

“I would very much like to start teaching in September, sir.”

“Splendid. I’ll make sure the two of you are put on the schedules. You’ll receive notices with your schedules, meetings and office numbers after the rest of the paper pushers are done sorting this all out. Mr. Sheppard, I will also be sending our guidelines for our doctorate students, as well as a list of possible advisors I think you would be interested in. I’m sure you already have it, but I want to make sure all of our ducks are in a row.”

“How long do I have to finish my doctorate, sir?”

“As long as your teaching is up to par, take all the time that you need. As for Dr. McKay, I expect the paper churning to start as soon as you step foot into a lab.”

“Like I haven’t given this university half of its intellectual reputation already, never mind that I’m 23 and some of your undergrads are older than me!”

“And for somebody who books as much lab time as you, Dr. McKay, our intellectual reputation should be exponentially higher than it is, if that’s true.”

“You wouldn’t know something intellectual if it bit—”

“Thank you so much, Dr. Kinsey. We very much look forward to working with you and I promise Dr. McKay and I will do our very best to safe-guard the universities reputation and will be a positive part of your faculty.”

“I very much look forward to that, Dr. Sheppard.”

John blinked at the title, opening his mouth to say that technically, he wasn’t a doctor of anything yet, but Dr. Kinsey had been calling Rodney Dr. McKay since he had started teaching, so it was probably out of courtesy.

“And if that safe-guarding has to be done by shoving Dr. McKay into a dark closet and only giving him a paper and pencil to write papers with, I won’t be sending out search teams.”

“If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d like to keep him out of closets for the time being. I can’t get to the basement to wash my laundry.”

“You know, I’m sitting _right_ here!”

*          *          *

By the time September rolled around, John had lost all excitement about teaching and was ready to wheel himself back to Dr. Kinsey’s office and tell him thanks but no thanks, he’d rather get some paper-pusher type job instead.

He had spent frantic weeks planning out his course outlines and making lesson plans and going over other instructors notes. He had two first year classes (differential calculus with applications to physical sciences and engineering in first term, and the continuing integral calculus course in second term) which were the two he was least worried about and was looking forward to. His two second year courses were multivariable calculus and linear algebra and those were the two he was feeling anxious about.

When he had first started preparing for his classes, he realized how long it had been since he had done any math or even cracked a textbook open. He realized he hadn’t done any studying since he had left for Somalia in January. Rodney had rolled his eyes at his worries and had grabbed a piece of paper and written some equations for John to solve and thrown in at him.

“If you can do those without breaking a sweat — and I know you can — then you’ll laugh your way through those courses.”

So John practiced and planned and worried and made handouts and made up lesson plans with Rodney looking over his shoulder and constantly wrinkling his nose and saying that those questions were too easy.

Rodney couldn’t understand why John was looking forward to his first year classes so much, since the material was laughable and the students were young and naïve, having just stumbled out of that alternate universe known as high school. John claimed that he liked the thought of teaching them the basics and making sure that they understood the concepts that they would be building on for years to come. Rodney would stare at him and then shake his head, loudly wondering how he had managed to get involved with a lunatic.

Rodney had actually gotten his wish and didn’t have to teach first year physics. Instead, he was teaching second year principles of photonics, third year thermodynamics and fourth year applications of quantum mechanics, and introduction to elementary particles. He gleefully created the trickiest questions and examples he could think of and threw out the recommended textbooks for nearly every course (he kept the thermodynamics text, but only because his own advisor — a man who Rodney claimed was only ‘half a moron and sometimes had his moments’ — was the one who had written it). John tried to intervene from time to time and suggest an easier example or a less abstract concept, but Rodney wouldn’t hear of it, telling him to go back to writing a babysitting manual, also known as a first year lesson plan.

The closer they got to the first day of school, the more gleeful Rodney got and the more scared John got.

They were sitting at their table, John going over his lesson plans for the millionth time and making sure he had a copy of all of his outlines, Rodney going over the list of advisors John could choose from and loudly rejected all of them, and Cat lying on a pile of old physics journals in the middle of the table, sound asleep.

Finally, John tossed his pen down and covered his face with his hands.

“Rodney, I can’t do this.”

“— and we all know that Cleavers got his diploma out of a dumpster so that means he’s out too, and if Bradford’s recent paper doesn’t prove that his IQ is in the single digits, I don’t know what does —”

“Rodney.”

“Yeah, what?” He didn’t look up from where he was crossing out Bradford and Cleavers names from the list with a flourish.

“I can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“Be in front of a class of hundreds of people and lecture them and have them stare at my chair.”

“They won’t be staring at your chair, they’ll be staring at you and being grateful that they have a hot prof so that they have some motivation for actually attending an 8:00 am class.”

“Rodney — ”

Rodney put his pen down and turned to face John. “You can’t hide in this apartment forever.”

“I haven’t been hiding! I’ve gone to physio and to the store and — ”

“You’ve gone to the store on your own exactly two times since we came home and going one block away to go to physio while using a road that nobody’s ever on doesn’t count either. You’ve been avoiding crowds and people in general and it’s time to stop. You can’t change the fact that you’re in a chair, John. You can either spend the rest of your life hiding in this apartment, and trust me, I would kick your ass if you did, or you can start getting out there.”

“I hate having people — ”

“Stare? I know, but we both know that nothing can change that. You just have to get used to it John. People always stare. They used to stare just because you’re gorgeous. Now they stare because you’re gorgeous and in a chair. They stare at Taylor because she wears her lab coat everywhere and they stare at me because I’m going bald and I’m fat.”

“You’re not going bald and you’re not fat, Rodney.”

“The point is, people are going to stare because that’s what people do. You have to find a way to get over it. There is no stopping it or preventing it and I’m not going to let you live the rest of your life hiding in a dark apartment. You broke your back serving your country and helping people whose lives are so incredibly fucked up that I can’t even begin to comprehend it. Don’t act like a paraplegic John, act like a soldier who came home from war and did his best and who knows that the people who love him are very proud of what he did.”

John stared at him for a long moment and Rodney stared back. Then John transferred his gaze over to Cat and picked his pen back up.

Rodney leaned back over the list. “And you’re not going with Delacroix either. Stupid hack wouldn’t know an integral from a set of multiplication flash cards.”


	10. In Sickness and In Health

John hardly slept the night before classes were due to start, nervous and scared as hell. He had set his alarm to go off at seven and quietly went about getting dressed, washing up in the bathroom and making himself breakfast and then leafing through his lesson plans one more time. He was so anxious that he barely heard Cat meowing below him, demanding breakfast. After he whispered an apology and fed her, he filled up a water bottle and stuck it in his cup holder and put all of his papers and textbooks in the storage compartments of his chair.

He was slowly spinning his chair around, wondering if he had forgotten something when a half asleep Rodney stumbled out of the bedroom, wearing his pajamas and no socks and shaking a finger at John.

“Wait for me,” he muttered before stumbling back into the bedroom and emerging two minutes later fully dressed, ignoring John’s reminders that his first class wasn’t until ten.

He went to the bathroom and then grabbed the cup of coffee John had poured for him. Gulping it down, Rodney nodded. “Okay. We can go.”

They didn’t speak as they made their way out of their apartment and along the winding streets leading to the cluster of instructional buildings in the heart of the university. There weren’t too many people around this early in the morning and John was glad, concentrating on just wheeling himself around tricky corners and across streets.

They reached the math building and Rodney immediately meandered over to the ramp with John, not bothering with the stairs. They trailed up it and Rodney held open the door for John, muttering about stupid old universities with no automatic door openers.

They made their way down the corridor and saw the occasional student drifting by, either clutching their books to their chests and looking anxious or stumbling off the wall, looking exhausted and not happy about another term starting.

John tried to give the nervous ones a smile but realized that it probably looked too fake to be a comfort. They reached his classroom and went in and John stared at the rows and rows of empty seats, knowing that within fifteen minutes, 253 people would be sitting in them, staring at him.

Rodney was busy checking the bulbs in the overhead projector and complaining that the string attached to the screen was too high up for John to reach.

While John fussed with his papers, too nervous to laugh or comment, Rodney yanked one of his shoelaces out and tied it to the screen string, demanding that John come and see if he could reach it himself.

Once that was fixed, Rodney fussed with the focus on the projector and wiped the blackboards clean.

As John watched Rodney wandering around and complaining, he felt himself calming down. Rodney was here and if Rodney thought he could do this then he could. Besides, he would just be two buildings over and if John did panic, Rodney could teach for him, right?

Feeling more secure, John pulled out his papers and tossed them on the table. For the first time, he glanced up and noticed that some early birds had come in, all of them pausing in the doorway to nervously glance around, this being the first time many of them had set foot in a university lecture hall.

John tried to give them all a smile as they came in and briefly caught his eye.

“Hey. Good morning,” he said, wanting to find a way to calm them down like Rodney was doing for him.

He would get a shy, wobbly nod or a whispered ‘good morning’ in response and the person would hurry over to the seats and spend long moments deciding which of the hundreds of empty chairs would be their choice for that day.

Finally, Rodney seemed satisfied. Turning to John, he yawned. “I’m going back home to sleep some more.”

“Okay.”

He walked up to John’s chair and leaned over him, not caring that there were already a few students sitting there, carefully trying not to stare at each other or them.

“You’re going to be fine. You’ve fought wars, John. These little critters are nothing.”

“You sure about that?”

“Absolutely.”

John nodded. “Okay. I can do this.”

“I know you can. I just wish you knew it too.” Giving John’s hand a quick squeeze, he straightened up and turned to glare at the surprisingly large crowd that had materialized during the last few minutes.

“Anybody gives him a hard time and you’ll suddenly find yourself having to do the homework I assign. Trust me, you would rather gouge your eyes out with your pencils.”

All the students blinked at him, some smiling and obviously thinking he was joking but some looking terrified.

“Rodney, quit terrorizing my students. Isn’t there a bed with your name on it somewhere?”

With one last glare, Rodney spun around and gave John a long look before sweeping out the door, but not before yelling “Remember, I warned you all!” over his shoulder before slamming the door.

John turned away from the door and forced himself to look at the nearly full auditorium, seeing more than 200 young, anxious faces staring back at him.

At that point, he found himself wishing he were back in combat in the middle of the desert with people shooting at him and launching RPGs at his chopper.

Rodney had been wrong. War was nothing compared to teaching.

*          *          *

By the end of his first class, John decided that no, he would rather teach any day. Yes, he missed flying, but teaching was way more fun than doing evacs.

He had started out by handing a person in the front row his outlines and asking him to please pass them around. Then he introduced himself, reminded them what course they were in — at which point somebody let out a “Shit, this isn’t genetics?!” and meandered out of class, glaring at his timetable — and what the course was all about.

He went over how he was breaking down the grades, the dates of the two midterms he had planned, his office hours, his TAs names and offices, and the practice problems he would be assigning from the text as optional homework. Even though the homework was optional, they would still have a math lab to do once week that was worth marks and they were strongly encouraged to do the homework and the labs and to come and see him or his TAs if they had any problems, since you couldn’t learn math by cramming the night before. When he got a few doubtful looks at that, he gave them a grin and told them that he had never done any of his English papers or studying except for the night before and he had gotten a degree just fine, but when he had tried to apply the same rules to math, he had been very sorry indeed.

The more he talked, the more relaxed he got and he even got a few laughs out of them and could see them relaxing a bit.

Five minutes after class had started, there was a commotion by the door and a group of eleven people filed in, stumbling over people as they tried to get to empty seats and bashing their bags into people’s faces. John saw one of them wearing his Army ROTC PT sweats and another her Air Force PT cap and he grinned.

“Morning PT drag on a bit long or you guys not used to snappy showers yet?”

To his absolute surprise, all eleven of them snapped to attention where they stood, scattered amongst rows of students and fixed their stares at the far wall behind John’s head.

John was so shocked that he momentarily just stared at them, this group of 18 year old cadets who were standing at attention as if he was their CO.

“At ease, guys. At ease. I’m not military.”

They all went to parade rest but didn’t sit down. John knew they had only started boot camp a few days before and had only recently been ‘broken in’ and still had a tough time knowing when to keep up the stiff military formalities and when to relax a bit.

There was some quiet murmuring from other students in the class, most of them not understanding what was happening.

One of the Army cadets’ eyes flicked down to John and then snapped back up to the back wall.

“You were military, sir. You were discharged because of medical reasons which means that you still deserve the rank that you earned. In my eyes that doesn’t change because you’re in a chair, sir.”

John stared up at him. He had no idea that any of his students knew about his background, especially brand new cadets. He knew that he wasn’t the only soldier to have come back from Somalia to the university and he guessed that there had been some talk amongst both the Air Force and Army ROTC cadets. He was even more shocked by the fact that these cadets were still treating him as if he was their superior, as if he was still a soldier and was one of their leaders.

“What’s your name, Cadet?”

“Brawson, sir.”

“Cadet Brawson, thank you. That means a lot. But I want to remind you all that I am no longer officially part of the military and you don’t have to treat me like I’m your superior.”

“Permission to speak, sir?” One of the female cadets—wearing her Army PT sweats asked.

“Go ahead.”

“Would it offend you if we still did, sir? Voluntarily?” She asked.

“Uhm, no. If you like you can call me sir but I want you all to know that the military doesn’t require it and I don’t require it. It means a lot, but I don’t require it.” He saw the civilians in the class nodding and whispering to each other but because he hadn’t asked the cadets a direct question, they didn’t say a word, just stood there and stared at the back wall.

“Understood?”

“Yes, sir!” Came a roar from the eleven of them that could probably be heard down the street.

“I’m impressed. That volume usually doesn’t come out until after second week is over. Have a seat, Cadets, and Cadet Brawson?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Come down here and grab some outlines for everybody, please.”

“Yes, sir.” Brawson sprinted down the steps and grabbed some outlines and then went back to pass them out.

The cadets waited until they had all gotten their outlines and then as one, they all sat down, staring at him with such awe in their eyes that John wanted to laugh.

He wasn’t anything special. He was just a guy who had needed money for school and then discovered that he actually liked the idea of being a soldier. He had gone off to war like thousands had done before him and had come back with fewer parts working than when he had left. Thousands hadn’t ever come home or been injured much worse or been much more heroic than John.

Yet he was the one being stared at by over 200 hundred eighteen and nineteen year olds like he was something amazing.

*          *          *

Once they got a routine going, first and second term slipped by. John would get up, make himself and Rodney breakfast and set the coffeemaker for Rodney and then hurry off to class, Cat on his lap.

He spent the day in the math building, teaching classes, sitting in his office and answering any questions that his students came by with, arguing with Rodney when he came by and pointed out mistakes on his whiteboard, and phoning potential thesis advisors and scribbling ideas down.

Always at exactly ten o’clock and again at two, he would wheel himself over to the bathroom and take care of things. There was a little fridge in the lunchroom of the math building and he kept bottles of water and juice and his lunch in there and just wheeled himself over when it was time to eat or drink something. A copy of his eating, drinking and bathroom times schedule hung on his wall, written in code that only he and Rodney could decipher, saving John a world of embarrassment.

At about five o’clock, John would stuff all of his papers into his chair pockets, turn off his computer, clean Cat’s litter box that stayed in the office, grab Cat, lock the office door and wheel himself over to the physics building. First he’d check Rodney’s office and, failing to find him there, he’d take the elevator up to the second floor where the grad students offices and the labs were. He’d go in, find Rodney in the middle of some brain storm or rant and he’d take over one of the tables and mark papers or work on his thesis outline while the sound of Rodney complaining drifted over him, Cat curled up on the table next to his stuff.

Sometimes it was hours later before Rodney would demand that he was done dealing with his people’s stupidity for the day and he would help John pack up and grab Cat and they’d go back home.

They had started bringing Cat with them when they realized how much time they spent in their offices and the lab and how unfair it was for the third member of their unofficial family. So John would feed Cat and take her with him in the mornings and keep her in his office. Everybody knew that he brought Cat with him everyday and that his door was open all the time—the temptation to steal calculus textbooks was always remarkably low—so people went in from time to time to play with her and keep her entertained. John would then take Cat over to Rodney’s lab with him and let her explore the lab while they worked. Sometimes Rodney would call him in the middle of the day to say that he was coming to get Cat early since there were too many morons in his office asking stupid questions and Cat helped keep him sane.

Once they got back home, Rodney would clean up things around the apartment, John would cook dinner and after they had eaten, they spent their time finishing up things for the next day or watching TV with Cat lying between them.

John still had nightmares and occasional flashbacks. His students quickly learned not to make loud noises and to let the door shut quietly behind them when they came in late. The one time that John had a really bad flashback in the middle of lecture, two of his students had taken off running for Rodney’s classroom and he came racing over like the devil was on his ass and dismissed the class before bringing John back to the present and calming him down.

Most of the physics and math students knew about Rodney and John’s relationship. Rodney was in John’s office so much and John was in Rodney’s lab so often that it was impossible to miss. John would sometimes ask one of his students to run lunch over to Rodney’s office and Rodney would sometimes take packs of John’s students over to his own office to answer their ‘moronic’ questions when John’s office was too full.

John had been afraid that the cadets might have a problem finding out that he was gay and in a homosexual relationship, but if they did, they never mentioned it. They treated them both exactly the same way that they would treat a straight couple.

Over the term Rodney got to know a lot of John’s students from hanging out at John’s office and making snarky comments when they came by for help and John knew many of Rodney’s students and grad students and helped calm them down after they had endured a particularly tough Rodney rant and looked on the verge of quitting school and heading back home.

*          *          *

It wasn’t until half way through second term that their routine got terrifyingly shaken up.

“—and we know the formula of a sphere’s volume is—”

“4/3πr3,” 253 voices — or he hope it was all 253 of them — droned out.

“Right.” He paused in the middle of writing the formula on the overhead transparency and rubbed his arms. Shit, it was cold in here today. He was wearing a sweater and he hadn’t been that cold this morning.

Pushing the thought out of his mind, he went back to concentrating on the problem he was working on with the rest of the class.

Three hours later, he went to the bathroom and the urine coming out of his catheter was a murky, dark yellow color and smelled worse than anything he had ever smelt before.

Not feeling any pain, he decided to ignore it for the time being and went back to his office where Cadet Brawson and two other students—Carolyn and Lisa—were waiting for homework help.

He twirled a marker in his hands and watched Brawson trying to do the question they were doing on his whiteboard while the two others slouched on the couch he kept in his office and watched Brawson working and played with Cat.

While Brawson worked, John suddenly felt like he was about to puke. He quickly closed his eyes and dropped the marker, lowering his head and forcing it to go away.

“Sir?”

He blinked a few times and looked back up, giving Brawson a tight smile. “I’m fine, Brawson.”

One of the students leaned over and grabbed the marker from the floor. “Here you go, Dr. Sheppard.”

He was about to correct her that he wasn’t a doctor of anything yet, but the nausea slammed into him again and he leaned over, praying that he wouldn’t puke in front of his students.

The feeling passed and he glanced up again, taking the marker. “Thanks, Carolyn. Now, where were we?” He scanned the whiteboard. “Right. Okay. Here’s our problem right here. If we simplify first and then use the chain—”

His stomach suddenly spasmed and bile rushed up his throat and he squeezed his eyes shut, breathing deeply through his nose until the feeling passed.

When he opened his eyes, he had three very concerned faces looking at him.

“Sir, are you sure you’re alright? You’re not looking too good.”

John opened his mouth and the bile rushed back up his throat. “Can, can, can!” he gasped out.

Carolyn dove for his trash can and stuck it on his lap a second before he lost control and hurled.

When he was finally done and the heaves were settling, he lowered the garbage can and accepted the glass of water and wet paper towel that had magically appeared before him.

“Thanks, guys. Sorry about this.”

Brawson was at his garbage can, taking it out and tying it up. “I’ll take the trash out, sir.”

“Thanks, Cadet. I owe you one.”

When Carolyn took back the glass of water from him, she frowned and touched his hand.

“Dr. Sheppard, you’re really warm.”

John reached up to touch his own forehead and found it soaked with sweat even though he was still shivering.

It was just a little fever. He probably caught the flu. No big deal.

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Let’s finish this question.”

With a huge effort, he gave her a wobbly smile and turned back to the whiteboard, the marker shaking in his hands.

Brawson appeared in the doorway again and handed Carolyn a new trash bag to put into the garbage can.

All three students exchanged a long look before Lisa mouthed “Dr. McKay” at Brawson. Nodding, he straightened up.

“Permission to be dismissed, sir?”

John sucked in deep breaths, feeling another bout of nausea coming on. He barely registered the question. “Sure, Cadet. Of course. See you tomorrow.”

Brawson saluted, spun on his heel and then took off, running out of the math building and into the physics building. He reached Rodney’s office in no time and stumbled in to find him yelling over the phone at somebody.

“Dr. McKay?”

“What is it, Brawson? Can’t you see I’m on the phone? Isn’t the military supposed to teach you delinquents some manners?”

“Dr. McKay, it’s Captain Sheppard—I mean, Dr. Sheppard, sir.”

Rodney rolled his eyes as he covered the phone’s receiver with his hand. “What about him? He’s in his office catering to the masses.”

“He’s sick, sir. There’s something wrong but he won’t admit it. It looks bad though.”

Rodney immediately slammed the phone down, leapt out of his chair and ran out of the physics building and into the math building, Brawson on his heels.

He skid to a halt once he barged into John’s office and knelt down before him.

“What’s the matter with you? You look like shit!” Rodney’s hands were everywhere as he felt John’s burning, sweat soaked forehead and grabbed his ice cold hands and noticed him trembling.

“It’s just the stupid flu or something, Rodney. No big deal. Can you finish this question with these guys?”

“How long has he been like this?” Rodney asked the three hovering, worried students, completely ignoring John.

“He was shivering in class this morning, sir,” Brawson supplied.

“And he puked about five minutes ago,” Carolyn added.

“Shit. John, did anything weird happen when you went to the bathroom today?”

John blushed a deep red. “Rodney!”

“Don’t Rodney me! Answer the question.”

“Yeah, things were a bit off.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Color and smell were a bit off,” John muttered, careful not to look at his students and hoping Rodney would quit fussing and forget about it.

Rodney snapped his fingers at the students. “You! Call an ambulance. Tell them we have a paraplegic with a possible UTI.”

Lisa nodded and grabbed for John’s desk phone and quickly ordered an ambulance and hung up.

“They’ll be here within five minutes, Dr. McKay.”

Rodney grabbed John’s chair and undid the brakes and started wheeling him out the door.

“You! Miranda!”

“It’s Carolyn, Dr. McKay.”

“Whatever.”

“What do you need?”

“Grab Cat and bring her over to Dr. Taylor’s office.”

“Of course, Dr. McKay.”

“Brawson!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Turn the lights off and lock the office.”

“Yes, sir!”

They reached the doors just as the wail of an ambulance could be heard in the distance. Lisa held the door open for them and Rodney pushed John through.

“Rodney?”

He barely heard John, his voice was so weak. “The ambulance is almost here, John.”

“I don’t — I don’t feel so good.”

Rodney stopped the wheelchair and two seconds later, John pitched forward. Rodney grabbed his shirt collar and prevented him from doing a face plant on the pavement.

Walking around him, Rodney grabbed his chin and gave him a shake.

“John? John!”

John slowly opened unfocused eyes, his skin pale and covered with sweat. His skin was so hot that Rodney thought his fingers would burn.

“John, you have to stay with me, okay? The ambulance is almost here.”

“Okay,” John mumbled, his head flopping on his neck.

The ambulance screeched to a halt beside them and two paramedics jumped out. They took some vitals and asked John some questions while Rodney screamed at them that talking wouldn’t solve anything and that they should get him into the ambulance already.

They finally loaded John on and Rodney jumped in beside him. The door was slammed and they took off, sirens blaring as they headed to the campus hospital.

*          *          *

John would only ever remember snatches of the next two days but they were a nightmare for Rodney.

John’s fever kept rising and nothing they gave him brought it down. Finally they had to stick him in an ice bath which was as much torture for John as for Rodney and the nurses.

The freezing cold water was torture for John and he screamed and pleaded for them to stop and get him out, his body shaking violently, weakly trying to fight them off with arms that wouldn’t work properly. Rodney stayed by his side, whispering into his ear that it would be okay, that it would soon be over, oblivious to the fact that he was absolutely soaked and shivering like mad from the ice water.

John’s fever didn’t break for 17 hours, during which he lapsed in and out of consciousness. The few times he was awake, he was delusional, thinking he was in his burning chopper or on a medivac or running down dusty streets, ducking sniper shots. It was worse than his nightmares because no matter what Rodney said or did, John didn’t snap out of it. A few times John would start sobbing with fear and whisper Rodney’s name over and over again, pleading that he wanted to go home and he was scared, unfocused eyes searching a landscape only he could see for a person who was right beside him but in another world entirely.

“Rodney? Rodney, I wanna go home. I’m scared, Rodney. Where are you, Rodney? Help me, please help me. Rodney? Rodney?”

Rodney would force himself not to cry and held John’s hand, stroking his face and whispering that he was right here, John was safe and would his fever please, please break already?

Seventeen hours later, his fever broke and John dropped off into a deep sleep. Only then did Rodney bother trying to pay attention to what the doctor had been trying to tell him for the past seventeen hours.

As Rodney had suspected, John had a urinary tract infection. There were many ways of getting one, as Rodney already knew and could recite from memory. The problem probably wasn’t that John wasn’t emptying his bladder frequently enough, since he drank enough water for three people and regularly peed every 3-4 hours like he was supposed to, and he knew to wash his hands properly before and after. Then the doctor asked when was the last time John had bought a new catheter, and Rodney had to restrain himself from slamming his head into the nearby wall.

He knew he had forgotten to put it on their shopping list last month. John had yelled out of the bathroom for him to write it on the list and Rodney had been reading an article and had waved a dismissive hand, saying he would get to it later.

That small oversight had probably caused the UTI and could have cost John his life.

They had been lucky this time. Since John’s fever had broken before his body was seriously damaged and the antibiotics were already doing what they were supposed to be doing, he would probably be okay.

After the doctor left, Rodney sat at John’s bedside, watching him sleep. Then he got up and walked into another room and grabbed the phone off the hook. Dialing Canada, he started talking before Jeannie was finished saying “Hello?”

“I want you to write on your calendar for every second day of each month, you’re going to call me in the morning and remind me to buy a new catheter. You’re going to let the phone keep ringing until I drag my ass out of bed and answer it and you won’t let me off the phone until I have sworn to you that I have written it down. Then I want you to call me that night to ask if I’ve done it.”

“Rodney, what’s going on?”

“John nearly died, that’s what’s going on!”

“What?!”

“He got an infection. I forgot to buy a new catheter this month and he got sick and we just spent hours going through absolute hell because of it.”

“Oh, my God, is he okay?”

“He will be. His fever broke.”

“And you? Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine. Just — do that for me, please? I’ll write it down in my own calendar but I don’t know if I can trust myself to remember to look at it, and this can’t happen again, Jeannie. It just can’t. We got lucky this time but the next time it might kill him.”

“Rodney, it’s okay — ”

Anger flooded him. “No, it’s not okay! You didn’t see him, Jeannie! He was so sick and confused and scared and he didn’t even know I was here.” He knew most of the anger was at himself, but taking it out on Jeannie made it better.

“As soon as he wakes up, he’ll know you were there the whole time and that’s what matters, right? And he’ll be okay, you said so yourself. John’s tough, you and I both know that. Everything’s going to okay. We just have to be a bit more careful, okay?”

Rodney didn’t answer.

“Rodney, John is going to be okay. You’re both going to be okay. You’re both way too stubborn to die because of an infection.”

After Rodney had hung up, he walked back to John’s room and sat down beside him, holding his hand.

He heard a knock on the door and was surprisingly unsurprised to see Kelly Taylor walk in.

“Hey. How is he?”

“He’s getting better. His fever broke and the antibiotics are working.”

Nodding, she snagged a chair and sat down beside Rodney. Leaning down, she picked up a duffel bag she had brought with her and dropped it into Rodney’s lap.

“Here. Clean clothes, your toothbrush, some other junk. Cat’s at my place, rediscovering her favourite haunts. I grabbed her litter box and stuff from your apartment.”

Rodney shook his head. It briefly occurred to him to be grateful that he had given Taylor a copy of their apartment key months ago for such emergencies. “I never thought we’d have to get back to this routine.”

“He’s going to be okay, McKay. You said so yourself.”

Rodney leaned forward and gently trailed a finger along John’s face. “I could have lost him, Kelly. I thought, I thought once he was home, I wouldn’t have to face that ever again.”

“Everybody has to face that everyday, McKay.”

“How can I live like that?”

“Don’t ever take a single breath you or John take for granted, that’s how. Cherish every moment that he’s breathing and that you’re breathing.”

Then she got up and pulled the other empty bed in the room closer to John’s. “Now shut up and get some sleep.”

“I have to be here when he wakes up, Kelly.”

“You will be. You’ll just be sleeping but I promise I’ll wake you up when he wakes up. But for both your sakes, that better not be for a long time.”

Rodney fell onto the empty bed, toeing off his shoes but not bothering to get changed. After what he had been through in the past few hours, he was exhausted.

Just before he fell asleep, he turned and saw Kelly sitting back in the chair, reaching out to hold one of John’s hands.

“Hey, Taylor?”

“Yeah?”

“Remind me to write you another promise note. We both owe you, again.”

She chuckled softly. “Consider this one a freebie, McKay.”

Before having the time to wonder about somebody doing him and John a favor without being related to either of them and without wanting something in return, Rodney promptly fell asleep, tightly holding onto John’s other hand.


	11. Disbelief and Doubts

“How many layers do you want?” John asked over his shoulder as he stirred the pot of bubbling meat sauce with one hand.

“Huh?” Rodney barely glanced up from where he was squinting at one of his third year’s exams. “Why does this moron write in font that requires a microscope to read?”

“Because they love to piss you off. Pay attention, McKay, damn it. How many layers of lasagna do you want? I have to put the pasta in.”

“Seven.”

John let the sauce simmer and he used his reacher to turn the heat down a bit before he wheeled himself over to the cupboards where he kept the pasta. Rummaging around in it, he finally pulled out the lasagna pasta. Wheeling himself back to the stove, he tore open the package and took fourteen long strips out and dropped them into the waiting pot of boiling water and set his timer.

He felt eyes digging into the back of his head and he glanced over at the table. Rodney had thrown his pen down and was leaning back, staring at him with an unreadable expression on his face.

“What? Do you want more layers?”

Rodney stared. “No.”

“Well, don’t expect me to help you mark all of those things. I finished marking mine this morning and putting all my grades in. I told you I’d help mark half. There’s no way you’re shoving all of them off on me. Besides, what do I know about third year physics?”

“I don’t want help marking these stupid things. If I can’t read it then you sure as hell won’t be able to figure it out.”

John turned back to the stove and stirred the meat sauce a bit more and glanced at his watch to check how much longer the pasta needed.

He wheeled himself over a bit and reached down to grab a glass baking dish out of the cupboard. Putting it on the counter, he reached over to grab the spices he needed for the meat sauce.

He could still feel Rodney staring at him. “Do I have an extra head growing between my shoulder blades?” he asked with a grin.

“No.”

“Then what’s the matter with you? You’re procrastinating. You know those marks are due in two days.”

“Marry me.”

John laughed. “If this is some stupid attempt to set a record for finding ways of procrastinating, you’re definitely heading towards the winning circle.”

John waited to hear Rodney laughing or throw his pen at him or start bitching about how he really, _really_ didn’t want to finish marking exams.

Instead, he got: “I’m serious, John. Marry me.”

He froze, one hand holding the jar of oregano over the meat sauce and the other still holding the stirring spoon.

“Rodney, quit it. This isn’t funny anymore. Did you hit your head today and start believing that same sex marriage was somehow legalized while you weren’t looking? Whether we want to or not, we literally can’t get married so my answer to that question is irrelevant.”

“I’m not trying to be funny and I didn’t hit my head. I’m serious.” A pause. “If it were legal, right now, would you marry me?” His tone was so nonchalant, as if he were discussing the weather.

Lowering the oregano, John stared at the steam drifting out of the pot of boiling pasta. Then he abruptly snapped out of it. Stirring the sauce again, he added some more oregano and then tasted it, rolling it around on his tongue. Frowning slightly, he decided it needed a bit more so he shook in a bit more and then put the spice aside. He glanced at his watch, checking how many minutes were left for the pasta.

Five minutes later, he had taken the meat sauce off the stove, put the oregano away and had struggled over to his siever mechanism with the pot of pasta and strained it.

Rodney hadn’t moved or said anything, just watched John continue cooking.

“Well?” He finally asked when John was starting to line the bottom of the dish with lasagna strips.

“Well what?”

“Usually when somebody asks them an important question like that, it’s usually followed by a response of some sort.”

John froze, sauce dripping out of the ladle he was using to spread the sauce over the first layer of pasta.

He lowered the ladle and leaned back in his chair, briefly closing his eyes. He didn’t want to have this conversation. He had been dreading having this conversation come up and had been naïve enough to hope that it never would.

“Rodney, even if it were legal, I couldn’t,” he whispered.

There was a completely stunned silence behind him for a moment. “What?” Rodney managed to sound confused, angry and hysterical all at once while trying to go for nonchalant.

“I couldn’t do it. I _can’t_.”

“I — I don’t — I — what?”

“I can’t. I _can’t_ , Rodney. I’m sorry.” With a huge effort, he pulled himself up straighter and forced himself to use a more cheerful voice, trying to steer the conversation back to safer ground. “Can we please move on now? Do you want double layers or single?”

“You’re asking me about the lasagna?”

“Yes, I am. I need to get this into the oven before the pasta gets dry. So, do you want double or — ”

“I ask you to marry me, you say you can’t, you’re _sorry_ and then you ask me about the fucking lasagna?!” Rodney was starting to yell.

“You’re overreacting, this was a purely theoretical dis — ”

“Overreacting? Overreacting?! How else am I supposed to react, you son of a bitch?!”

Reaching up, John forced himself to start folding another layer of pasta on top, gently patting it down.

“You can’t even look at me, you asshole, can you?” John heard a chair being shoved backwards and moments later, Rodney shoved him aside, grabbed the glass dish and hurled it against the far wall. It shattered, sending glass shards and bits of pasta and splatters of meat sauce everywhere.

“Rodney — !”

Rodney grabbed his chair and spun it around until he was facing him. John had never seen him that angry before.

“Why?” Rodney demanded, his face white and furious.

“What?” John leaned back from Rodney, feeling intimidated by him for the first time in their relationship.

“You heard me! Why?”

John blinked. It was so simple. So simple. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. He wanted to marry Rodney more than anything else. But he wouldn’t do that to him. He couldn’t.

He gaped at Rodney for a long moment. Rodney must have misinterpreted whatever he saw on John’s face because he pulled away, stumbling a little into the counter top and running his hands through his hair.

“Are you just here because you think nobody else wants you? Is that it? You think I’m the only one pathetic enough to want to play house with you?”

“What? Rodney, that’s not — ”

“Or am I just your little personal servant, huh? Good enough to do your laundry, carry your stuff, hold doors open, but not for marrying, huh?”

“Rodney, that’s not what, you’re wro — ”

“I waited for you! I waited for months, you stupid, selfish son of a bitch! I sat here and worried and cried and put my whole fucking life on hold for you!”

“I know, you — ”

“And as soon as I got that phone call, I dropped my entire life and raced half way across the world to be with you! I sat in that hospital for months and put up with your bitching and complaining and temper tantrums! I even learned how to stick a catheter up my dick so I could teach you because you were being a fucking two year old!”

“Rodney, I know — ”

“And did I get to have my life back when I got back home? No, no. It’s still all about you! I redo our entire apartment so you can reach the juice in the fridge easier, I wake up a dozen times a fucking night to roll you over and let’s not forget, when you woke me up, covered in your own piss and shit, did I get up and go sleep on the couch like I could have? No! I got up, carried your reeking, disgusting self into the bathroom, cleaned you up, cleaned our room up and then fell into bed without you having to do a damn thing! I have never asked you for anything, you selfish bastard, and the one time I do, you say you can’t?! After everything I’ve done for you, I’m still not good enough for you?!”

Rodney’s words hurt more than if he had driven a knife through John’s gut. The loathing and anger in Rodney’s voice made John want to cry or shake him until his teeth fell out. Instead, his pain turned into a sudden, inexplicable rush of anger.

“I never asked you to take care of me! I told you not to wait for me! It was your own choice to wait for me so don’t you dare say that your sob-fest was my fault! And I told you to get back on a plane and get back to your life! It’s not my fault you decided to hang around!”

“So I’m just a moron who thought this was actually a relationship, not just me being an idiot who was offering his cleaning services for free?!”

“Why would I say no to free laundry service?!”

The second the words were out of John’s mouth, Rodney’s eyes widened and he looked like John had punched him.

It took John a few moments until his brain had caught up with his mouth. He was still breathing hard, angry for no good reason. Everything Rodney had said was true, but when he had started making it sound like John hadn’t done anything to try to help and hadn’t done any work in the past year, that had pushed John over the edge. Rodney knew, he _knew_ how hard John had worked to readjust!

But that anger and the fact that Rodney had said some stupid things didn’t excuse what John had said.

“Rodney, Rodney, I’m sorry. I didn’t — ”

Rodney spun around, hurried to the door, yanked it open and walked out.

“Rodney! Don’t! Fuck, Rodney, come back!” John quickly wheeled after him, making it out of their apartment just in time to see Rodney disappearing through the front doors. Wheeling across the foyer, John grabbed the heavy front doors and started trying to force them open. He pushed forward and finally managed to get them open enough. Too late, he realized he was hanging onto the doors and had managed to pull himself half out of his chair.

Not caring, he let go of the door and fell to the ground, his chair tipping him neatly onto the sidewalk, half of him wedged in the door.

He stared down the sidewalk to see Rodney walking further and further away.

“Damn it!” John swore to himself, pushing himself up and pulling himself forward, dragging his useless lower half along the ground.

“Rodney! Wait!” He yelled. He was gasping for breath and his hands were being scraped raw from the sidewalk but he kept going, knowing he couldn’t lose that person walking away from him. Rodney was all he had.

John had no idea how long he dragged himself along the sidewalk, his arms burning from keeping himself propped up and his hands stinging. He was half sobbing as he went, breathing too hard to keep yelling for Rodney to stop and wait for him.

He barely registered two of his fellow professors crouching down beside him, both of them looking worried sick and asking him where he was going and where his chair was.

He was too weak to fight them off as they lifted him up and carried him back to his apartment building. They put him in his chair, asking him questions he didn’t hear. They wheeled him back inside, asking him if he wanted help cleaning up and where was Dr. McKay?

John sat there, staring into space, feeling like a helicopter had landed on his chest. He doubled over and hugged himself, suddenly feeling like he had back when he had been in Kuwait, in combat for the first time, alone and scared.

But back then, he had known that somewhere, half way around the world, Rodney was waiting for him and that had given him the courage to keep going.

Now Rodney wasn’t waiting for him anywhere. Rodney was gone and for the first time since John was eighteen, he was alone.

*          *          *

After he had finally convinced the two professors that he was fine, Rodney was fine and everything was under control, they finally left.

John stayed up that whole night, waiting for Rodney to come back. He cleaned up the kitchen—which required a lot of crawling around on the floor and getting his shirt covered in sauce and glass shards—and carefully put the rest of the pasta and meat sauce into the fridge.

Rodney had made him promise never to cook when he was alone and he wasn’t going to make another mistake.

So he ate cereal for dinner and stayed up all night marking Rodney’s exams and entering his marks into the computer.

Every few hours, he would glance up at the door, expecting to hear Rodney hammering on the outside door, not having taken his keys with him.

When he was done, he spent some time cleaning the rest of the apartment, folding random pieces of clothing and washing dishes. Then he rolled himself to the table and started working on his summer lesson plans.

His eyes got heavier as the hours ticked by, his body utterly exhausted from crawling around, but he refused to fall asleep.

When Rodney came back he would need John to open the door for him and it would take John forever to crawl from the bed into his chair and to the door and he didn’t want to risk Rodney leaving before he got the door open.

So he stayed firmly in his chair, from time to time propping his legs up on a nearby chair to keep his circulation going properly.

He gave up on his lesson plans by about four thirty and just stared at the door, ears straining to hear any noise from the foyer.

He was still sitting there when the sun came up and the person in the apartment above started moving around.

*          *          *

Rodney still wasn’t back four days later.

John refused to accept that Rodney would never come back. Logic dictated that Rodney had left absolutely everything here—including his wallet—and would need to come back to get his things.

John was determined to be there when he came back, even if it was just to get his things.

He had to explain, he had to tell Rodney why he had said he couldn’t. He had to make him understand that he was doing it for Rodney because he loved him and wanted him to be happy. He had to explain that.

So he sat in the apartment. He cancelled his physio class and begged out of a department meeting. Thankfully classes were over and both of their marks had been submitted, so he had plenty of time to sit and wait. Because that’s what he had to do. He had to wait however long it took until Rodney came home.

He had to be here to open the door when Rodney came home.

He spent his days learning how to do everything himself. He made himself a promise that he would never again depend on Rodney for anything. He would never again make Rodney do things for him.

He went to the bathroom by himself, brushed his teeth and rinsed his mouth by himself, rolled himself over during the night and even managed to get into and out of the bathtub by himself, even though he lost his grip on the slippery edge of the tub and slammed his chin into the bottom and cut his lip slightly.

He didn’t cook anything. His only options were cold things or microwaveable things. He even started calling people about getting a replacement for Rodney’s summer classes, saying that Rodney wasn’t feeling well and might not be available to teach. He fed Cat and played with her, both of them spending long moments staring at the door and waiting for Rodney to walk back in.

He carefully collected his dirty clothes in the hamper and was determined to go and do his own laundry at the end of the week. He knew their building didn’t have an elevator and the laundry room was in the basement, right below him. He knew that he couldn’t possibly get down those stairs in his chair with an armload of clothes and detergent. But he’d find a way.

Even if he had to crawl down the flight of stairs backwards with each individual sock, he would do it. The more he thought about it, the more he managed to come up with a semi-realistic plan. He could just throw the bag of laundry down and crawl down, holding a small bag of detergent in his mouth. How he would reach the top loading washing machines to get his clothes in was still a problem. Maybe he could just aim, pray and hope that enough of his things made it inside. Then he thought about how he would toss the detergent in, shut the lid and turn the controls and he nearly wanted to cry. Then he thought about how he would get the clothes back _out_ and actually felt a frustrated tear brimming his eyes.

Then he shook himself. He’d find a way. He had to. Maybe he could put his reachers together in a way that would allow them to bend to reach the clothes…?

When Rodney came back—to get his wallet—John would tell him that he would never again need Rodney’s help for anything. If Rodney stayed, John would do everything himself.

The nights were the hardest. It had been months since he had slept by himself, and he had never spent a night in a bed that didn’t contain Rodney and only held his smell. He rolled himself to Rodney’s side and spent the night breathing in his smell, trying not to cry and missing Rodney so much that it made him ache. Cat had taken to coming into his room and sleeping on the bed with him. John was so glad to have her for company that he didn’t care how much she shed on his pillow.

He hardly slept, not just because it felt strange and disorienting to wake up and not feel somebody else beside him, but because he was scared of having a nightmare and not having Rodney there to pull him out of it.

That was another problem he needed to find a way to deal with. Rodney shouldn’t have to wake up to him screaming anymore. He mulled it over for a while, finally deciding that he would tell Rodney he would sleep on the couch and sleep with his face jammed into a pillow so his screams wouldn’t wake him up.

He’d tell Rodney. As soon as Rodney came back. To get his wallet.

Rodney had never mentioned his nightmares as being on the list of things he had to deal with for John, but John knew it should have been on there. Rodney had just been angry. He had forgotten about that detail.

When he woke up on the fifth day, he immediately got into his chair, rolled over to the door and opened it, checking to see if Rodney had arrived during the night and John hadn’t heard him.

Nothing but the empty foyer stared back at him, just like it had every morning.

Sighing, he shut the door and went about getting dressed, feeding Cat, and making himself a cold breakfast. Then he turned on the television, getting ready to watch a few hours of useless daytime shows while Cat sat in his lap and they both tried not to stare at the door.

At about noon, John’s phone rang. His heart jumped in his chest and he lunged for the phone.

“Rodney?” He gasped out, not knowing whether he wanted to laugh or cry.

“Sorry, John. Not quite.”

His excitement drained out of him like water in the tub, recognizing Kelly’s voice.

“Hi. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. I know who you were expecting.”

John leaned his head back, closing his eyes. “It’s not that I’m not happy to hear your voice. Is something wrong?”

“With me? No. With you two morons? Yeah. I know where Rodney is.”

His eyes flew open and he nearly crushed the phone as his grip tightened. “What? Where?”

“He’s with me.”

“What?” John stared up at the ceiling, realizing that Rodney was sitting two floors above his head.

“I ran into him when he was walking around five days ago. He said he didn’t want to go back home so I told him he could stay with me for a while. Originally he wanted to go to Jeannie’s, but—”

“He left his wallet and passport here.”

“Yeah.”

John didn’t know what to say. He had a million questions and a million things he had to say. But the one that struck him as most important was why he was talking to Kelly.

“Why did you call me?”

“Because you’ve been sitting holed up in that apartment, and if you’re as miserable as McKay is then I thought it wasn’t fair to keep you dangling like that. He didn’t let me call you for a few days cause he was mad at you — quit glaring at me, McKay — but he said I could call you today and let you know that he’s fine.”

“When — when is he coming down to get his things?”

“Hopefully soon. He’s stretching out all my shirts and I’m not letting him borrow my razor.”

“Oh. Should I, should I pack everything up?”

“What?”

“In boxes? So it’s easier?”

“Boxes? What are you talking about?”

“For when Rodney comes to get his things out.”

“You want him out?” She sounded completely shocked.

“No! No, no, no! But if he wants out, then I’m not going to stop him.”

“John, he doesn’t — ”

John heard a voice sharply saying something in the background and Kelly’s voice broke off.

He heard a muffled sound as Kelly covered her receiver with her hands and the voices rose as they argued over something.

Finally, Kelly let out a frustrated sigh and came back on the phone. “I am apparently not allowed to discuss this any further since it’s none of my business and your partner is a pigheaded moron.”

“He’s not a pigheaded moron, Kelly. That’s just me. Can I talk to him? Please? I have to tell him something really important and after that, if he never wants to talk to me again, I understand, but I really need to talk to him. Just for a minute.”

“Hang on.” He heard another muffled sound and heard voices arguing again before she sighed again. “He says he doesn’t want to hear it.”

“Please?” John nearly wanted to cry. Rodney had to give him the chance to explain. To tell him he was doing this because he loved him and wanted him to be happy. And obviously, being with John hadn’t made him happy so John had been right all along.

“McKay, you’ve let him sweat it out long enough. Would you just listen to him? Just for thirty seconds?” A pause while somebody — presumably Rodney — replied. “You’re such a dumb ass! What? Mind my own business? You made your life my business when you started sleeping on my couch! God!” He heard what sounded like something being thrown. “John, he doesn’t want to talk to you. I’m sorry. Call back in a few hours, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Hey, are you okay down there? Do you need anything?”

“No. No, I’m fine. Hey, can you tell Rodney that? Can you tell him I’m doing everything by myself?”

Kelly repeated his words to Rodney, at which a “What, you want a fucking medal because you’re suddenly capable of wiping your own ass?!” drifted through the phone.

Kelly’s outraged yelling barely made it through the phone as John hung up.

Covering his face with shaking hands, he barely felt Cat nudging his elbow. He took a shaky breath, not allowing himself to cry. He deserved this. He had known this was coming for months.

He glanced down at Cat. “He’s fine. He’s upstairs. You want to help me pack his things up?”

She gave him a long look. “Okay, fine. Go sleep on the bed and I’ll pack. Fuck, we don’t even have boxes.”

He wheeled himself into their bedroom and opened the lower drawer, carefully taking out Rodney’s shirts. He stared at the half empty drawer and felt a lump rise in his throat. That would be his life from now on.

Holding the shirts up to his face, he breathed in Rodney’s smell. Lowering them, he bit his lip and exchanged a look with Cat.

“You know what? I’m not going to let him go without explaining. I’m not going to fight to keep him since that’s not fair to him, but I’m going to explain.”

Putting the shirts on the bed, he wheeled himself back into the livingroom, picked up the phone and called Kelly.

“If he won’t listen, then I’m coming upstairs. It’s your apartment so you have every right to let me in, right?”

“John, don’t be crazy, that’s four flights of stairs!”

“I don’t care.” He hung up the phone and grabbed his keys. He glanced down at Cat who had followed him. “Come on, let’s go talk to Rodney.”

He wheeled himself out of the apartment, locked it and went to the stairwell. Putting the brakes on, he gestured upwards. “We’re going up, Cat. You can lead the way.”

The tiny feline cocked her head, staring at him as he hoisted himself out of his chair and onto the floor. Pulling himself forward, he reached the first stair. Grimacing over how filthy the stairs were, he planted his arms on the first one and pulled himself up.

Their progress was slow. John’s arms burnt from pulling himself upwards and the edges of the stairs dug painfully into his arms and ribs. He sneezed a few times when dirt from the stairs drifted up into his nose.

He was sweating and gasping for breath by the time he had made it up the first flight. Pulling himself around the flat stairwell, he reached the next flight.

He glanced over his shoulder at Cat, who was slowly padding up the stairs behind him, staring at him. “Come on,” he gasped out. “Three more.”

Wiping the sweat off his forehead with his arm, he forced himself not to stare up at the towering stairs, only concentrating on the one right in front of his face.

He was so focused and so exhausted that he barely even heard the snarky voice coming from above him.

“You’re crazy, you know that? Those stairs are filthy.”

John paused and glanced up, seeing Rodney standing at the top of the second flight, having walked down to the second floor.

He was leaning against the railing, his arms crossed over his chest and staring down at John with a blank look on his face.

John drew in shuddering breaths, his ribs aching and his arms burning. “I had to — I had to — explain.”

Rodney hadn’t moved. “Explain what?”

“Explain — why — why I can’t.”

“You don’t want to. That’s a pretty simple explanation.”

John shook his head so firmly that he felt himself sliding down a step. He tightened his grip on the edge of the stair to keep himself from sliding even further. “No, no, no. I want to. I really want to, but I can’t do that to you.”

Rodney cocked his head and stared down at him. He seemed to be deciding something. John opened his mouth to keep explaining but Rodney held up a hand.

“We’re not going to finish this conversation with you lying on a filthy stairwell.”

He jogged down the stairs until he reached John. Reaching down, he grabbed one of John’s arms and started slinging it over his shoulder, but John yanked it back.

“No, no, no. I can do it. Let me do it.”

“John, don’t be ridic —”

“No, let me do it. You don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything ever again.”

Without waiting for Rodney to start up again, John started pushing himself backwards down the stairs. Reaching the flat portion, he pulled himself around, shoving his legs over and trying to see over his shoulder as he started pushing himself down, hoping his legs wouldn’t get caught in the railing.

Rodney watched him for another moment before he firmly shook his head, pressing his lips together. Stepping down beside John, he grabbed him and pulled him into his arms, even as John started squirming.

“No, Rodney, I can do it. You don’t have to.”

“Shut up,” Rodney whispered into John’s hair, slowly walking down the stairs with John in his arms. “Shut up. I’m not going to stand here and watch you dragging yourself around on the filthy floor. I might be mad at you, but I love you and I’m not letting anybody I love crawl around on the floor.”

John put his arms around Rodney’s neck and clung on, burying his face in his neck and nearly wanting to sob at the familiar smell surrounding him.

He was surprised when Rodney stepped past his chair and carried him to their door. John fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his key and opened the door. Rodney carried John into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet lid with John on his lap. Reaching up, Rodney grabbed a washcloth, wet it and started wiping at both of their hands and John’s face.

“Rodney, I can do it. You don’t—”

“I know you can. Just shut up.” Then he lifted John up and carried him into their bedroom and set him down on the bed. Leaving John there, he got up and went out to get John’s chair and shut their door.

When he came back, John had taken off his dirty shirt and thrown it on the laundry hamper.

Rodney walked over to the bed and sat down beside him. They were silent for a while until Rodney’s eyes landed on the neat pile of his shirts lying on the bed.

He stiffened. “When do you want me out by?”

John frowned. “What?”

“Packing up my stuff is usually a sign that somebody wants somebody out.”

John stared at the floor. “No. In this case it’s a sign that somebody understands that somebody wants to leave and is willing to let that somebody go without making a fuss.”

Rodney frowned, trying to figure out who the different ‘somebody’s’ were referring to. Then his face cleared and he turned to stare at John, an incredulous expression on his face.

“You thought I wanted to leave?”

“You said you were sick of living like this. And I understand that. I’m willing to start doing everything myself but if that’s still not good enough, then I understand if you want to go. You deserve a lot better.”

“You’re basing all of this on what I said that night?”

“It was all true, Rodney.”

“Maybe the examples were true, but not the other stuff. John, I didn’t mean any of that! You caught me off guard when you said no and I was angry.”

“I didn’t say no. I said I can’t.”

Rodney frowned at him. “What’s the difference?”

“People say no if they don’t want to. People say they can’t if they can’t.”

“John, you and I both know that same-sex marriage isn’t legal here — yet — but we have other options.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is? If you’re willing to do everything yourself and still want me around then this is obviously more than just a case of wanting to keep and not marry your cleaning lady.”

John stared at him, incredulously. “Of course this is more than that! I love you, you idiot! I don’t want to lose you or have to give you up, but if you want to go, then I’ll let you.”

“What does that have to do with getting married?”

“I just said, Rodney, if you wanted to go, I would let you. Getting married would complicate that and I don’t want it to be complicated. I don’t want that to force you to stay if you don’t want to.”

Rodney stared at him. “So that’s what this is all about. You want me to have an easy way out if I wanted one.”

John couldn’t look at him, not wanting to start crying and make Rodney feel guilty. He had to make sure Rodney understood this. “Yeah.”

Rodney sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “John, the stuff I said the other night, I didn’t mean it. Taking care of you has never been a burden. It’s a part of who you are now.”

“But eventually you’re going to find somebody else who doesn’t need to be taken care of as much and you’re going to want to be with them. And I get that. That’s why I don’t want to tie you up with any legal junk. You mean everything to me and if letting you go would make you happy, then I’d do it.”

Rodney looked pained. “Why can’t you understand that you make me happy?”

John sighed. “Because I’m the first person you’ve ever had a serious, long term relationship with. Because you’re twenty-four and there are a lot of things that you haven’t had a chance to explore yet. Maybe in ten years, some great guy will come along, a guy who has everything that you love about me, except he has two working legs and a functioning dick. You’d be an idiot to stay with me instead.”

Rodney closed his eyes. “John, I have always had plenty of opportunity to be with other people. You were gone for months, during which I went out to movies and seminars by myself all the time. A lot of people tried to talk to me and you know what? I wasn’t interested. Because even though I knew I would go home to a cold and empty bed, I would have rather sat by myself, watching a movie, then sit with somebody who isn’t you.”

“You say that because you haven’t come across anybody who you really like.”

“Yes, I have. Eight years ago. This incredibly awesome guy asked me if he could share my cafeteria table with me because the place was so crowded. He was holding his calculus text and a wrinkled, highlighted copy of King Lear and I remembered thinking, who would take math and Shakespearian lit at the same time?”

John smiled. “I can’t believe you remember that.”

“I do. Every moment. If I know this is good enough for me, then why can’t you accept that?”

“Because we have no idea what other crap life will throw at us.”

“We’ve already survived being separated by war and learning how to live our lives with a serious disability. What makes you think we couldn’t weather anything else that life throws at us?”

“I know we could. I just don’t believe that you’ll want to.”

“Because you think I would rather have an easy relationship, right?”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Me. Not if that easy relationship didn’t have you in it.”

“You say that now — ”

“And I’ll be saying it ten years from now and twenty years from now.”

“I doubt you’re going to be here in ten years, never mind twenty.”

Rodney opened his mouth to start yelling, wanting to shake John and find a way to get it through his thick skull that he didn’t want anybody else and never would. Not because he couldn’t, but because John was everything he wanted and needed.

Sighing, Rodney lay back and stared up at the ceiling. “So we’re at a stalemate again, huh?”

“I’m sorry.”

Rodney glanced at John, who was sitting with his back hunched, staring miserably at the floor.

“Come here, you idiot.”

John lay back and they wrapped their arms around each other, both of them clutching at each other, having missed the other fiercely in the past five days which had seemed like five years.

John stared at Rodney as he traced the edge of his ear with a finger. “I’ve been doing things on my own. Everything.”

Rodney frowned. “Did you cook?”

“Only with the microwave.”

“Good. Otherwise I’d have to smack you.”

John smiled but then got back on track. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I can do most things by myself and I’ll even try to do laundry this weekend.”

“How are you going to get down there?”

“I’ll find a way.”

“Never mind that, but how are you going to turn the machines on or even get the clothes back out?”

“I — I’ll think of something.”

Rodney rolled his eyes. “You’re being a moron.”

“You were right, Rodney. You spend too much time taking care of me.”

“I thought we already established that what I said was idiotic and untrue and would be disregarded?”

John continued as if he hadn’t heard. “And I’ll start sleeping on the couch. With my face in the pillow.”

“What? Why?!”

“So I won’t wake you up.”

Rodney stared at him for a long moment before he shook his head. “Don’t be an idiot, John! I’m not kicking you out of our bed because you have nightmares!”

“But it’s not fair for you — ”

“Oh, and it’s fair for you? We already established that there wasn’t a little box on those ROTC forms that said ‘check if you want to be a paraplegic’. Was there a box that said ‘check if you want to have PTSD and nightmares for the rest of your life’?”

“Rodney — ”

“No. We’re going to forget that the past five days ever happened, okay? We had a fight, now we made up and we keep living life exactly as before.”

“But you wanted to get married.”

“And I still do. I just have to wait until you’re ready.”

“I’m really willing to change things if you want me to.”

Rodney rolled them until he was leaning over John, his arms framing his head.

“Listen to me, Sheppard. This is a relationship, a partnership. Being a couple doesn’t only mean having sex and going out to the movies. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is taking care of each other. It’s what partners do.”

“It’s not fair to — ”

Rodney put a finger on John’s lips. “It’s not fair to you either. But I’m not going to stop doing my part and taking care of you, not just because we’re partners and we need to work as a team if we’re going to make this work, but because I love you and I want to take care of you.”

John stared up at him for a long time before he nodded. “Okay.”

Rodney smiled and leaned down and kissed him. John groaned and parted his lips, drawing Rodney’s tongue in. Wrapping his arms around Rodney’s neck, he pulled him closer, not realizing how much he had really missed him until just now.

There would come a time when Rodney would leave him, of that John had no doubt. But until then, he would do his best to keep him happy and to allow himself to be happy.


	12. Other Side of the Coin

The great thing about working at a university was that time seemed to fly by when it was packaged in convenient semesters and bracketed by small breaks.

After spending long, long hours on their couch and at their table, they both worked through their theses, Rodney double checking John’s math and John double checking Rodney’s math and non-existent grammar.

Since Rodney had a two term head start on John, he finished his doctorate a year before John did. After reading through the 326 page paper for the millionth time, they both finally declared that they could either call it finished or go blind. Then John would randomly quiz Rodney at odd times of the day, asking questions that they thought the panel might ask. For the week before his dissertation, Rodney walked around in a daze, bumping off furniture and forgetting to put shoes on while constantly muttering equations under his breath. Cat wisely stayed out of his way and John spent his time cooking healthy food to prevent Rodney from constantly munching on junk food.

John marked all of Rodney’s exams, helped prepare his lesson plans for him and walked him to class to make sure Rodney didn’t wander off into the labs by default. About twice a week, John would get some of Rodney’s panicked students showing up at his office, demanding to know if such and such was going to be on the exam. He would apologize and say that the only place such and such would be was on Rodney’s thesis, and no, second years weren’t expected to understand it. Then he would go and try to hammer it into Rodney’s head only to teach what John wrote up on his transparencies and handouts, nothing more. Rodney would blink at him, nod and then start rambling about photons again.

About a year later, the situation reversed itself when it came time for John to put the finishing touches on his own thesis and prepare for his dissertation. Cadet Daniel Brawson had to put his hand up about once a week to tell John that he was going way off on a tangent and if he could please get himself back on track?

After waging weeks of war on the program that students had to use to write their math proofs with, John finally declared that he would go blind and have his brain seep out of his ears if he had to put up with it any longer. So Rodney and him spent a day sitting in the computer lab, rewriting the program until they were satisfied.

When John finally rolled himself out of the room where his dissertation had taken place, Rodney leapt on him, nearly threw the wheelchair over and started sobbing that they had finally made it. The panel members just grinned with amusement when they came out and saw them, congratulating them both and shaking John’s numb hand while he tried to force a smile on his face. The relief John felt about it finally being over was almost more than he had felt in Kuwait when his CO told him it was time to go home.

They called Jeannie once a week and caught up on what Caleb and Madison were up to and John would try to wrestle the phone away from Rodney when he started bitching about the inadequate curriculum at the private school Madison was attending—even though Rodney had been the one to pick the school in the first place.

When Kelly suspected her boyfriend was cheating on her, she called them up and asked them to go spy on him, which they quickly agreed to. After following the jerk from one frat party to another covered in lipstick and beer stains, Rodney lined John up on the sidewalk, calculated momentum and trajectories and gave John a push just in time for John to slam right into the guy. Not only did John bowl him over, but John knew for a fact that having his foot rests slam into somebody’s shins hurt like a bitch. After much apologizing, John sighed with regret, saying that he really wanted to help the guy up but, hello, guy in wheelchair here. Sorry.

They left him lying on the sidewalk, clutching his shins and trying not to cry and went back to their apartment where Kelly was waiting on the couch.

They spent the night watching sappy chick flicks, opening all the junk food that they had and taking turns handing Kelly wads of tissues and patting her on the back, heartily agreeing with her when she starting ranting about what pigs straight men were.

They never went on any trips anywhere. Not just because they didn’t really want to and they had everything they needed right here on campus, but they knew how much John’s body depended on a strict routine and they didn’t want to mess it up.

They spent their semesters teaching, wandering around campus and helping students during their office hours. After coming home from the lab with Cat, they spent their time sitting together at the table, marking tests and making lesson plans and handouts. When they were done with the important things, they would lie on the couch, John reading the interesting articles in Science or another journal to Rodney as he rubbed John’s legs, sending mental threats to any blood clots.

On days when they didn’t have to teach and didn’t have office hours, they got together with their colleagues to debate ideas and theories and scribble random bits of equations on whiteboards, papers and at times hands and walls.

They wrote papers, published them, and John sent Rodney as his representative to the conferences he couldn’t get to. If it would have been a life or death situation, of course John could have easily flown over, but after going to a few conferences where he had spent way too much time being stressed out and having his body rebelling against him, he decided to stick to conference calling and sending Rodney. He knew that the organizers always tried to accommodate him, but the hotels weren’t always completely wheelchair friendly, the hallways were sometimes too narrow and the bathroom were sometimes tiny, not to mention that scheduling six seminars to be presented one after the other obviously didn’t allow for snacking every four hours and peeing every three. Besides, he got a great kick out of sending Rodney to take a few of his fellow mathematicians down a peg or two after they had trashed his latest paper and compared his math to that of a grade-schooler.

Rodney always said that this was the reason he liked going to the conferences, but really John knew it was a health issue. They had suffered through two other UTIs—which had scared Rodney more than John— and John had been beyond humiliated when he had wet his bed at a conference in New York—probably due to the slight three hour time difference. Rodney also refused to go to conferences that were longer than three days long. During those three days, John could survive without cooking or doing laundry, but longer proved problematic.

They solved the problem by getting their other colleagues to go and sent some equipment with them that allowed the conference to show up on their computers at home. This way, they could yell at idiotic scientists from all around the world while they sat at their table.

Rodney would sigh happily while sitting with his bare feet on the table, munching on a piece of cake and wearing his bathrobe, saying that everybody should get a paraplegic for a partner and have a valid excuse for being lazy for the rest of their lives. In response, John accidentally ran over his toes with his chair three times that day. When Rodney had hopped around, cursing under his breath and clutching his foot, John had smiled innocently and said that he had thought Rodney claimed life with someone in a chair was great.

John couldn’t believe it when Cadet Brawson showed up at his office one afternoon, asking if John and Rodney could come to his graduation ceremony. He had lost his parents in a car accident when he was eight and his elderly grandmother who had raised him couldn’t make the long trip out to California.

John had stared at him for a long moment, having a hard time realizing that he had known the Cadet for nearly four years. He did a quick mental count and realized with shock that he had been in his wheelchair for almost exactly four years.

Rodney had rolled his eyes about how the military’s plan to make kids happy about going off to war by giving them a fancy new rank of lieutenant was stupid, but he agreed to go. John couldn’t help but feel proud as he saw dozens of his students walking up to get their diplomas and the ROTC cadets being saluted by their COs and given their brand new lieutenant insignias after getting their diplomas.

He hadn’t taught some of them for more than a semester but many of them kept coming back to his office for help with homework, random questions that they had been stumped on or just to chat.

The majority of them were the ROTC cadets, most of whom didn’t have family close by and got a bit lonely at times. Not to mention, they loved being able to bitch about hard ass COs and obnoxious upper class cadets to someone who understood what they were talking about, but would never rat them out and didn’t have any obligations to demand they show proper respect for their fellow comrades. They liked sitting on John’s couch in his office, petting Cat and chatting about how their days had been. They chatted about brutal PT sessions, hilarious new marching jigs they had thought up and how so and so kept calling their drill instructor ma’am even though she had been replaced by a man months before.

Sometimes Rodney would wander by and sit on John’s desk, rolling his eyes and pretending to be bored listening to military rubbish and complaining that ten years ago, he hadn’t even known what PT stood for.

In September, Lt. Brawson came into John’s office to discuss doing his masters and asked him if he was allowed to take on graduate students yet. John regretfully said that the university frowned on giving grad students to someone who didn’t have tenure yet as anything other than TAs, but he could recommend some people who he knew would treat Brawson fairly and get him through his masters in one piece.

John thought he would see very little of Brawson from then on, but he kept stopping by, needing help with his assignments and wanting to chat.

That was also the year that John turned thirty, much to Rodney’s delight. Rodney never usually rubbed it in his face that he was younger than John, but for weeks Rodney didn’t let him forget the fact that John was now in his thirties and Rodney was still twenty-eight. When John had glared at him, Rodney had smirked and told him, it’s okay, he had always liked old men. Sorry, sorry. He had meant to say _older_ men. Old _er_.

John had thrown his fork at him and threatened to spend his birthday sleeping on the couch. Rodney had stared at him, horrified, before picking him up, carrying him into their bedroom and making up for his comment.

Early the next school year, Rodney was offered tenure, becoming one of the youngest associate professors in their university’s history. He eagerly accepted, gleeful of the fact that he could get graduate students of his own to harass and use for doing the research he didn’t want to do but had been ‘strongly encouraged to look into’.

*          *          *

Around February of 1999, one of John’s students asked him to turn on CNN on mute while they were doing homework in his office.

John did and spent more time watching CNN than helping with homework. Some of the civilians in his office seemed irritated, but the cadets—especially the AF cadets—watched the reports, looking scared and worried.

When the report took a break for commercials, one of the second year cadets gave John a terrified look.

“Will we have to go, sir? If NATO decides to start an air strike?”

“No, Cadet. No cadet has to go to combat.”

“But what about the TAs, sir?”

John sighed, thinking about one TA in particular. “I don’t know. Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

One of the civilians sitting on the couch was frowning at him. “What air strike? What are you guys talking about?”

John gave her a sad smile. “Don’t read papers much, huh?”

She shrugged. “No. I know the rest of the world is messed up. I don’t need to read about it.”

“You’d care if you had to go fight there!” The cadet snapped.

John frowned. “Hey! Cadet, back off and sit down.”

She immediately snapped to attention and then sat down. “My apologies, sir.”

“Don’t apologize. Just kindly remember that civilians don’t have to be concerned with the rest of the world if they don’t want to be.”

John turned back to the civilian who had asked the question. “Ethnic Albanians in Serbia want Kosovo to be declared a separate country from Serbia. They’ve been fighting with the Serbs for years but now it’s getting serious.”

“Who’s side are we on?”

“There’s been reports of ethnic cleansing conducted by the Serbs, and Albanian refugees fleeing their homes in droves, so if it comes down to that, we’re probably going to be going after the Serbs.”

“But I thought you said the Albanians have been fighting the Serbs too? It’s not like they’re innocent.”

John sighed. “No. They’ve just been able to convince the press that they’re being victimized more effectively than the Serbs have. Both sides deserve some of the blame, just like in most conflicts. You have to remember that we don’t know all the facts.”

The civilian snorted. “People are morons.”

He smiled. “I know a certain Dr. McKay who would absolutely agree with you.” He turned back to the Cadet. “As for what your role in this conflict will be, I swear to you, you won’t have to set foot on foreign soil until you graduate, and by then, this will hopefully have blown over.”

John went home that night with Rodney, hoping he had set the younger cadets minds at ease. But try as he might to ignore it,  he knew that the rest of the world was once more invading his life, even if this time he wouldn’t be the one getting the marching orders.

In early March, NATO declared that they would launch an air strike against Serbia and aviators from all over the world were mobilized.

For the first time, John sat beside the window with Rodney and watched cabs of BDU wearing Air Force officers with heavy packs slung over their shoulders leaving.

They didn’t speak as they watched them leave but Rodney had one hand on John’s shoulder and was gripping it.

John reached up and gently squeezed his hand, glancing up at him. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m staying right here this time. You know that.”

Rodney stared down at him with wide eyes, remembering months of fear, loneliness and tears. He nodded and tried to smile reassuringly but for the rest of the day Rodney refused to let John out of his sight and that night, Rodney slept clinging to him, slight tremors coursing through him.

John held him with one arm and reached into the bedside table with the other and gently rubbed his dog tags, the metal gleaming in the darkness. A part of him was so thankful that he didn’t have to go this time, but another part of him wanted to be on that plane with the others more than anything else.

The air strike lasted nearly 4 months and thousands of combat missions were flown. They spent the four months watching CNN and hoping that none of the planes shot down contained any officers who they knew.

They both suffered with worse nightmares than before after spending hours watching fighter jets and helicopters being blown into balls of fire and crashing to the ground. But they refused to allow themselves to keep living in their little bubble while people they knew were fighting. Rodney would lie on the couch, holding John in his arms and would cover John’s eyes whenever one of the jets blew up or a helicopter crashed, forcing himself to keep watching the screen through his tears, waiting for names to scroll past.

They did lose one of their own. A former ROTC cadets from Rodney’s class who had often come by John’s office to chat was shot down on May 7th while flying his F-16. His navigator and he were both dead by the time pieces of burning metal crashed to the ground below.

John told Rodney he could go to the funeral on his own but Rodney insisted on going. His death hit Rodney harder than it had hit John. John knew that pilots accepted the risk of death the second they stepped into an aircraft and that no pilot held the illusion that they would be guaranteed to see old age. John had just been lucky.

It didn’t mean John didn’t feel the loss.

Rodney completely broke down the day his name had scrolled past on the screen. Part of it was the fact that Rodney had never had to deal with actually losing somebody in combat, but a part of Rodney would always think it was John in that crashed jet.

For weeks afterwards, Rodney was the one who had terrifying nightmares — seeing John in that jet moments before he was blown out of the sky, and seeing John’s picture beside the flag draped coffin at the funeral. He would wake up sobbing and terrified and would cling to John for the rest of the night, cutting off the circulation in his arms and begging him to never, never leave for war again, completely forgetting that John wouldn’t be leaving for war ever again even if he wanted to.

John would hold him, kiss away his tears and promise him over and over again that he was never leaving again and that it hadn’t been him in that jet.

“I came home, Rodney. You know that. I came home and I’m never leaving again. I promise.”

*          *          *

Half way through summer term, John was in his office, marking tests and munching on carrot sticks when Lt. Brawson knocked on his door.

“Lieutenant! Come on in.”

John put his pen down and grinned up at him, but seeing the worried look on his pale face, he frowned. He opened his mouth to ask but Daniel held up that familiar white envelope and John shut his mouth again. Even thought it had the Army insignia on it rather than the Air Force one, all those envelopes looked the same.

“Marching orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When?”

“Three weeks.”

John had a strange feeling of déjà vu and remembered how he and Rodney had had a eerily similar conversation before Somalia, only it had been him holding that white envelope.

“Where to?”

“Kosovo. Part of the KFOR.”

“It could be okay. I know you guys are expecting a lot of combat, but you might be surprised. Everybody over there is pretty tired. It might actually just be a peacekeeping mission like your paper says.”

Brawson gave him a tight smile. “You really believe that?”

John snorted. “No. But it’s a possible scenario.”

Brawson stared down at his envelope and fiddled with the edges. “I can’t believe I’m going to war, sir.”

“It’s terrifying, I know.”

“Does it get any easier?”

“No. The terror is always there, but if you’re lucky, it sometimes gets overridden with a feeling that you’re doing something good over there.”

“And what if it never gets overridden?”

“Then you keep hanging on and stay in one piece until you can come back home.”

Brawson let himself fall onto the sagging couch. “My girlfriend doesn’t know if she can wait.”

John pressed his lips together. “Send her to talk to Rodney.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

*          *          *

“She’s not waiting, sir.”

“Did she say why?”

“She said Dr. McKay told her that she had to be really sure if she wanted to wait because the person coming back won’t be the person who left.”

John was silent.

“She said she doesn’t think she could cope with that. She wants to get on with her life, you know. Not put it on hold.”

John was still silent, not knowing what to say.

“I went and talked to Dr. McKay too. He said that if you really, really want to be with somebody and you know there isn’t anybody more perfect out there for you, then you can wait. Waiting sucks but you’d rather wait than move on with somebody else.”

John cleared his throat. “I’m really sorry, Brawson.”

“I’m not, sir. Obviously she wasn’t the one.”

“You still have us.”

“Sir?”

“You still have Rodney and me. Always. We’ll wait.”

A pause. “That means a lot, sir. Thank you.”

John stayed in his office that night until Rodney finally showed up, eyebrows raised.

“Are you sleeping here tonight or what?”

“Brawson is leaving for Kosovo in three weeks.”

“I know. I talked to him about it. I told him I expect phone calls once a week and letters as often as possible. Are you seriously sleeping in here?”

“You’re amazing, you know that?”

Rodney frowned, obviously caught off guard. “What? Why?”

“Come here.”

Rodney stepped around his desk and cautiously stepped up to John, who reached out and yanked Rodney onto his lap.

“Hey! Would you be careful? I’m going to crush you.”

John wrapped his arms around him and buried his face in Rodney’s shirt. Rodney ran light fingers through his hair and rested his chin on John’s head.

“What’s going on? Tell me.”

“Thank you for waiting for me. I know I said you didn’t have to, but I couldn’t have done it without knowing you were waiting for me.”

Rodney kissed John’s temple. “I didn’t just do it for you. Like I told Brawson’s girlfriend, you have to want to wait for it to be worth it. And I did.”

Then Rodney gently disentangled himself and took the brakes off his chair. “Come on, Sheppard. Let’s go home.”


	13. Proving the Hypothesis

Lt. Brawson was gone for six months. Much to all of their relief, John’s prediction had been accurate and their potential combat mission turned into a pretty calm peacekeeping mission.

Still, they saw their fair share of skirmishes and Brawson came home with some shadows in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. But true to their word, John and Rodney dutifully sat by the phone waiting for him to call — with Rodney impressing John with the speed at which he could calculate time differences and accurately predict when Brawson would be calling — and helped him readjust to civilian life without forgetting that he was a soldier.

The summer after Brawson came back home, John got offered tenure and Jeannie came down with Caleb and Madison to visit for the weekend as celebration.

The summer was also when they got a new professor added to the physics department, a new guy from Princeton who came highly recommended despite the fact that he was only two years older than John.

John noticed the new guy before Rodney did, partially because he always tried to get to know the people in the physics department. This was so he’d know who he had to go apologize to about Rodney saying such and such in order for Rodney to get the funding he wanted for a new project.

His name was Dr. Mike Layton and he wasn’t only smart, but he had a great sense of humor, was athletic and gorgeous.

Much worse than that was the fact that the guy had a crush on Rodney from the minute he laid eyes on him.

John noticed it the second they got introduced. Usually people’s eyes only lingered on Rodney when he was jabbering about some brilliant theory, not when he was bitching about crappy coffee offered at faculty meetings. Layton had laughed at Rodney’s bitching and agreed with him.

John immediately understood that the guy was only trying to engage Rodney in more conversation and didn’t give a shit about the coffee, but Rodney was completely oblivious.

And he continued being oblivious.

John had never before hated being in a different department from his partner, which prevented him from always being able to stay between Mike Layton and Rodney.

Mike Layton’s teaching schedule and lab schedule always seemed to match Rodney’s and he would often show up at Rodney’s office, claiming to have some free time and offering to take half of the crowd waiting for help from Rodney to his own office.

They spent hours of time together at the labs, working together, arguing and eating lunch at the same time so they could continue their hand waving arguments while scribbling equations on napkins.

Whenever John would show up at the labs, Layton would give him a strained smile, greet him and then pretend that John wasn’t there. Whenever Rodney would move over to John to bitch about useless grad students or to ask to borrow some paper, Layton would quickly grab Rodney’s sleeve and tug him back, offering sympathy and magically conjured up paper.

John knew he was being a jealous idiot and that he had known this would happen for years. He just didn’t think Rodney would keep him dangling like this.

He had always known that Rodney would find his better, healthier version of John somewhere. A version whose body and mind weren’t damaged by war.

He wanted to get in Layton’s face and fight for what was his, but he knew that was not only ridiculous, but it wasn’t fair to Rodney. How could a cripple measure up to someone like Layton? Besides, he had always sworn to himself that he would let Rodney go if he found somebody better.

That night, he didn’t go up to the lab but instead went home with Cat lying on his lap. He warmed up some leftovers and set the table for dinner and then wheeled himself over to the window, mentally preparing himself to have this conversation without crying.

Hours later, he heard somebody frantically running in the foyer outside and then the scratching of a key trying to unlock a door too quickly and missing the lock. The door was flung open and Rodney fell inside.

“John?” Rodney gasped out, staring wildly around and finally spying him by the window. “Where were you? You didn’t come to the lab and you weren’t in your office and you scared the shit out me!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? I thought you passed out in class and had to be taken to the hospital and that nobody had told me!”

“I didn’t want to be in the way in the lab so I came home.”

“In the way? You have your own table set up in there, moron. It’s been your table for years.”

Rodney took off his jacket, threw it on the couch and dumped his papers onto a nearby chair before collapsing at the table, still glaring at John and stabbing at his pasta.

It was only after a few bites that Rodney realized John hadn’t put a plate out for himself.

“Why aren’t you eating? Get over here.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Fine, then eat some crackers and cheese or something. The store finally had those sesame seed crackers again. I grabbed about ten packs yesterday.”

“It’s okay.”

Rodney swallowed and waved the fork at him. “No, it’s not okay, idiot. Schedule, remember? Geez, after all this time you’d think that you had it down. Go get yourself some crackers and cheese.”

John kept staring out the window. “You won’t have to worry about the schedule anymore after this, will you? Must be a relief, huh? No more schedules, no more doing all the laundry, no more sleeping on a bed pad.”

Rodney snorted. “Yeah, and the day after your legs start working again, I’m going to get a hot tub installed right beside the table and I’ll be allowed to do research without having to teach morons and there won’t be any more war anywhere in the world.”

“Rodney, I’m serious. If you want to go, you can go. I get it.”

“What are you talking about? Would you come and eat?”

John sighed. “Please don’t make this any more difficult than it is, okay? If you want to keep the apartment then I’ll need some time to find another place somewhere. If you’re okay with it, I’d really like it if I got to keep some of the automated things and the siever. I can pay you for them if you want. And I’m thinking that the fairest thing to do would be to do a joint custody thing for Cat.”

Rodney was staring at him while John fidgeted by the window. “Sheppard, are you drunk? Because I swear, if you went to the biology beer garden with Kelly, you’re sleeping on the couch for a week. You know you’re not supposed to drink lots of alcohol.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“Then what’s the matter with you?”

“I told you already—”

“You haven’t told me anything! You keep repeating some nonsense about wanting the siever but I still don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about Mike Layton.”

Rodney raised an eyebrow. “Who?”

“Mike Layton, Rodney. Doctor. Mike. Layton.”

“Yeah, I heard you the first time. I still don’t know who you’re talking about. You know me and names.”

John clenched his jaw. Why was Rodney making this harder than it had to be?

“The new physics prof in your department, Rodney! The one who’s crazy about you! The one who wants me out of the picture as fast as possible!”

Rodney frowned. “Are you talking about the blond guy? I thought he was straight. Huh.”

John slammed his fist on his armrest. “No, not the blond guy, McKay! The brunette, the hot, brilliant, crazy-about-you brunette!”

Rodney’s expression brightened. “The one with the glasses? If he has a crush on me then I can so move in on his lab time! He’s had that Friday night slot for weeks!”

“He doesn’t wear glasses, McKay! He’s the brunette who argues with you 24 hours a day, helps your students during your office hours, hands you a tissue every time you sneeze and gives you his pickles off his sandwich and finds any excuse in the world to be around you all day.”

Rodney frowned. If John didn’t know Rodney as well, he would think that Rodney were playing him, but Rodney was honestly trying to think of the person John was talking about.

Finally, the light seemed to go on. “Are you talking about that new guy from Princeton?”

Finally. “Yes, Rodney.”

“I thought he wasn’t getting here until January.”

John stared at him while Rodney stared back, having forgotten about his dinner. “So you’re saying he’s already here?”

“Yes, McKay. Damn it! He’s been here for weeks and flirting with you.”

“Really? Damn! You see what being off the market for so long has done to me? I’m completely oblivious to people flirting with me.” Rodney smirked, obviously pleased with himself. He was about to turn back to his dinner when he saw John staring at him sadly.

“What?”

John didn’t say anything. Rodney sighed. “John, I swear, I never flirted with the guy. I mean, you know me, I don’t flirt, period. I just laugh at inappropriate times, drool and spray food on people’s faces. And have you been seeing any of those things happening with — with whoever the hell you’re talking about?”

“Rodney, it’s not about that.”

“Then what’s it about?”

“Mike Layton is perfect for you. He’s smart, funny, he really likes you, you two seem to get along well — ”

“Good for him. I’ve already got somebody’s who’s smart, funny, really likes me and who I get along with.”

“He’s not in a chair.” John said it so quietly that he wasn’t sure Rodney had heard. But moments later, he heard a chair being pushed back and then Rodney knelt before him, looking up at him.

“No, he’s not and I couldn’t care less. He’s not you and that’s all the matters to me.”

“But — ”

“No buts. I have never been here because I’ve been waiting for the healthier version to walk up, John. I love you. I don’t know what else to say. If I didn’t want to be here, with you, then I wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t have waited, I wouldn’t have stayed in that hospital and I wouldn’t have been here with you for all these years. If I were looking for someone better, don’t you think I would have noticed somebody like Sam Brumby?”

“His name is Mike Layton, Rodney.”

“Whatever. You see? You only told me your name once and, granted, it’s John and easy to remember, but I remembered your full name from the second you told me, didn’t I? I’m betting I’ve been introduced to this guy a dozen times and I don’t even remember meeting him. You know why? Because I’m not interested. I have everything I want right here and that’s not going to change.”

And for the first time, John actually found himself daring to believe Rodney.

*          *          *

September 10th, 2000 fell on a Sunday that year. John called up Kelly on Saturday and asked her to please take Rodney to the cafeteria and to sit at a very specific table. She asked him what he was up to and he asked her to please not ask any questions and just do it and she would find out soon enough.

That night he wheeled himself over to the library and asked the librarian to find him two very specific books.

On Sunday morning, he pretended to be absorbed in marking and barely glanced up when Rodney walked out, saying he was going to eat lunch with Kelly, who for some stupid reason wanted to eat in the overcrowded cafeteria.

He gave Rodney a good head start and then followed him, the two textbooks tucked in the side pocket of his chair.

He reached the cafeteria and immediately spied Rodney and Kelly sitting at that specific table amongst a sea of other students. Kelly was casually looking around and when she saw him, she said something to Rodney, then got up and walked away, like John had asked her to. Rodney barely glanced up, munching on fries and reading a journal.

John wheeled himself up to the table. “Hey, is this seat taken?”

Rodney glanced up, looking mildly irritated before seeing who it was. “Yes, idiot. That’s Kelly’s seat and you know it.”

John briefly closed his eyes. “That’s not your line, McKay.”

“What? Do you want a fry?”

“No, I don’t want a fry, Rodney! You’re ruining it!”

Rodney blinked at him. “What are you talking about?”

John stared at him. “It’s September 10th, Rodney.”

“What’s September 10th?”

“It’s been our unofficial anniversary for fifteen years.”

“What?”

“Exactly fifteen years ago today, I came up to you at this table and asked if this seat was taken.”

Rodney stared at him. “Fifteen years? We’ve been together for fifteen years?”

John smiled. “Yup. Fifteen years today.”

They stared at each other for a moment before John wheeled himself back a few steps.

“If we’re going to do this properly, then we have to start again.”

“Do what again?”

“You know what. Just don’t mess up your lines this time.”

John wheeled himself back a bit more and then wheeled himself back up to the table, giving Rodney that same come-hither smirk he had fifteen years ago. There had been less lines around his eyes back then, but it still had the ability to make Rodney weak in the knees.

“Hey, is this seat taken?”

“Not really.”

“Cool. Mind if I sit? It’s kinda crowded in here.”

Rodney shrugged, struggling to hide his smile. “Sure.”

John shoved Kelly’s chair out a bit and then hoisted himself into it. Rodney nearly burst out laughing. “John, you don’t have to be that authentic.”

“Shut up, McKay. Your lines, remember?” Then he tossed his two textbooks on the table.

Rodney’s eyes nearly fell out of his head. “You — ”

“Lines, McKay. Lines.”

Controlling himself, Rodney stuck another fry into his mouth and pretended to look over the two books even though he knew what they were.

“You’re taking Calc and English?”

“Kinda. Shakespearian lit.”

“Who on earth would take lit voluntarily?”

“It’s kinda cool. Here. Look at this.” John reached over and flipped King Lear open to the same page he had fifteen years ago.

Rodney glanced at it, expecting to see the same highlighted passage of rubbish he had rolled his eyes at and John had crowed about.

Instead, there was a white piece of paper stuck amongst the pages. On it was written:

_Will you marry me?_

Rodney froze. For a moment, he thought somebody else had left that in there and he was about to crack a joke about it, but then he recognized John’s writing and could see him grinning nervously at him.

Rodney stared at him. “You’re serious?”

“I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”

“You’re really, _really_ serious?”

“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Rodney, and you’re the best thing that ever will happen to me. I don’t want or need anybody else. I’m just sorry it took me fifteen years to feel secure enough to ask.”

Rodney was still staring at him, tears brimming in his eyes.

John poked him slightly. “So? What do you say? You wanna marry me?”

With a laugh and a sob, Rodney yanked John over to himself. “Of course I do, you idiot!”

“So, just for clarification, that’s a yes, right?”

“Yes, it’s a yes!”

They were both laughing and crying, John sitting on Rodney’s lap, making out like the teenagers they used to be and oblivious to the cheering, clapping and hooting going on around them and Kelly standing there, crying harder than both of them, calling them both morons for taking so long.

*          *          *

They got married a month later. They borrowed some suits from some of Kelly’s friends and caught a cab to take all three of them over to the courthouse. Jeannie, Caleb and Madison flew down and met them at the courthouse too.

Civil unions had been legal in California since 1998 so very few people stared at them as they waited in the hallway, Rodney bitching about the steepness of the ramp outside and John fiddling with his tie, always forgetting how to tie the things.

It was a small, private affair just like they had wanted it to be. Jeannie and Kelly were their witnesses and Caleb played best man for both of them and Madison insisted on being the flower girl, even though they weren’t in a church and didn’t have any flower petals. Rodney took a bowl of candy off the receptionists desk, emptied it over her keyboard and tore up some post its and handed it to Madison, telling her to go nuts and throw them anywhere she wanted.

They had both written their own vows, even though Kelly and Jeannie had helped them out. John thought he would feel more nervous once they got started, but to his surprise, it all just felt normal. Madison grinned and threw colorful pieces of paper all over the floor, Kelly was leaning against the wall, smirking at him and remarking that now he was really officially off the market, and Rodney nearly had a stroke when he was asked for their rings and he realized he didn’t have any.

Then John grinned and reached into his own pocket and pulled out two metal chains. Rodney stared at them with wide eyes, instantly recognizing the small rectangles rimmed with black silencers.

John quietly handed Rodney one chain. His eyes still wide, Rodney quietly read the two tags. John had split up his tags and put one on each of their chains. The only thing he had changed on his own tags was adding ‘McKay’ after his last name. The other tag on each chain was one with Rodney’s name on it with ‘Sheppard’ written after his last name.

Rodney looked like he might start crying so John loudly cleared his throat and asked if it was okay that they used tags instead of rings. Everybody in the room gave him slightly amused looks, but nobody minded.

Using the tags seemed more fitting than rings for the two of them.

They handed over their completed paperwork, said their vows and their I Do’s, exchanged their tags and then they were pronounced civil partners for life.

They all drove back to their apartment, wanting to have a little celebration before the Millers had to go back up to Canada.

To their surprise, Lt. Brawson was sitting on their front steps, waiting for them. He jumped up, hugged them both, remarked that Rodney looked better with tags on than he himself did, and then declared that they all had a party to get to.

Ignoring John and Rodney’s questions and protests, Lt. Brawson spun John’s chair around and started marching down the sidewalk towards the science buildings, the Millers and Kelly grinning behind them, denying having any knowledge of a party of any kind.

When they got to the math and physics building, they saw a huge crowd of people including their students, their colleagues, the Dean, the university President, the staff from the physiotherapy center and dozens of ROTC cadets and officers. An enormous banner had been hung between the buildings, congratulating the two of them.

Lt. Brawson grinned, clapped them both on the back and handed them both overflowing cups of beer and thus, one of the largest physics/math beer gardens ever thrown at their university began.

Rodney had barely taken a sip of his beer before Mike Layton came up to both of them, giving Rodney a sorrowful look and John a strained smile.

“Congratulations, Sheppard.”

John smirked. “Thank you, Layton.”

Rodney’s eyes suddenly widened. “You’re Brumby?”

“Excuse me?”

“Layton, Rodney. His name is Mike Layton.”

“Whatever. We seriously have to discuss the nauseating amount of time you spend around me, because I’m married now and that means I’m off the market.”

Still bitching about it, Rodney pulled Layton over to the pizza, not seeing the point to missing good food while ranting.

John found that being in a chair was very advantageous at a party, since people seemed to come up to him without him having to navigate through the crowds and risk flattening some toes. He took a few sips of his beer and then handed it to Caleb, telling him he didn’t want to start married life sleeping on the couch. Caleb laughed, said he totally understood and drained his cup for him.

He had no idea how many people came up to him and congratulated him. They were all smiling and all happy for them.

At one point, John heard a “Captain Sheppard!” from behind him. Force of habit made him straighten up immediately. He was shocked when a smiling General Renton stepped up from behind him.

“Sir,” John nodded in greeting, feeling uneasy, and being silently grateful that he had put his new tags back underneath his shirt. It was one thing to find out that one of your former cadets had been blatantly breaking military regulations and it was another to throw a party celebrating the fact. He mentally berated himself for not making Rodney put his own tags under his shirt.

“I hear congratulations are in order.”

“Uhm, thank you, sir?”

The General smiled down at him. “You’re a hell of a soldier, Sheppard. I’m glad you came back home.”

“Sir, let me explain. Uhm, Rodney and I, we weren’t, I mean, uhm — ”

“Captain, do I look like an idiot? I’m bound by the same idiotic regulations that bound you. Just because I couldn’t openly discuss your relationship with you didn’t mean I didn’t know and didn’t mean I disapproved. You are a hell of a soldier and who you choose to share a bed with doesn’t change that.”

John smiled. “Thank you, sir. That means a lot.” He frowned slightly. “Won’t the brass be upset that you’re here now, sir?”

The General smiled. “Captain, none of us military folk are really here right now, understood?”

John laughed. “Completely, sir.”

Renton stuck his hand out and shook John’s hand. “So, if you could please tell your significant other to stop glaring at me every time he passes by, I would appreciate it. I have permanent holes burned between my shoulder blades from fifteen years of glaring.”

“I will, sir.”

“Congratulations again, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Another cadet ran up to them, saluted and handed the General another beer.

“Seeing how you’re not really here sir, there’s also some nonexistent pizza over there.”

“Is there? Splendid. Lead the way to the nonexistent pizza, Cadet.”

“Yes, sir.”

*          *          *

“Would you put some sunscreen on?”

“I’m fine, Rodney.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, do you want to openly invite cancer to move in?”

Laughing, John stretched out a hand and felt Rodney slap the sunscreen tube into it. Snapping it open, he put some on his face and arms and then lay back on the grass, loving the feel of the sun on his face.

Cat lay sprawled out on his chest, fast asleep and purring like a jet engine.

Rodney sat back on his lawn chair, his feet up on John’s unused one and pulled his laptop back on his lap and resumed typing.

Hearing a distant whirring above him, John looked up, scanning the blue sky and quickly saw the helicopter churning through the skies, the blades whipping through the air.

For one moment, a fierce longing swept through him.

Rodney had stopped typing and was fingering his tags. John had tried unsuccessfully to try to get Rodney to wear his tags inside his shirt, since he kept getting them caught in everything and nearly strangled himself a few times, but he refused to listen to him, wanting to ‘flaunt the physical proof that he had bagged the hottest Air Force pilot in existence’.

“You miss it, don’t you?”

“War?”

“No. Flying.”

John sighed. “Yeah. I always will.”

Rodney lowered his screen and John could feel him staring at him.

“I told you, if I could give you my legs, I would.”

“I don’t need your legs, Rodney.”

“Really?”

“Really.” He craned his neck and grinned up at his husband. “I’m perfectly happy with my life on the ground.”

Rodney smiled. “I told you we’d make something special out of it, didn’t I?”

“Yep, you did. And you were right.”

Rodney snorted. “Of course I was right. I’m always right. After all this time, it’s about time you start accepting that as an irrefutable fact.”

John laughed, as the sound of the helicopter faded away.

Crossing his arms behind his head, he went back to dozing in the sun, listening to Rodney resume his typing.


End file.
